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B 945 .J24 B4 1926 | 
Bixler, Julius Seelye, 1894- 

Religion in the philosophy | 
of William James 













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Che Amberst Books 


RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 
OF WILLIAM JAMES 


The Amberst Wooks 


The publication of @he Amberst Wooks was 
initiated in connection with the celebration of the 
Centennial Anniversary of Amherst College. The 
volumes are written by Amherst men, and deal 
simply and clearly with matters and problems of 
significance. 


First SERIES 


THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
By ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 


THE LIFE INDEED 
By Joun F. GENUNG 


ESSAYS IN BIBLICAL INTERPRETA- 
TION 


By HENRY PRESERVED SMITH 


GERMANY IN TRAVAIL 
By Otto MANTHEY-ZORN .............0-; 2. 


PARTIES AND PARTY LEADERS 
By ANSON DANIEL MORSE 


THE COMING OF MAN 
By JoHN Mason TYLER 


RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
WILLIAM JAMES 
By Jutius SEELYE BIxLER 


SECOND SERIES 
THE MINER’S FREEDOM 
By CarTER GoopricH. Illustrated 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE HORSE 
By F. B. Loomis 





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SS SEP 291926 





LOGICAL sew 


RELIGION IN THE 
PHILOSOPHY OF 
WILLIAM ‘JAMES 


JULIUS SEELYE “BIXLER 


ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE 
IN SMITH COLLEGE 


ee! 


BOSTON 
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
1926 


COPYRIGHT: 1926: BY 
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 


Printed May, 1926 


THE PLIMPTON PRESS + NORWOOD: MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


To 
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in whom are combined the two qualities 
which James found essential for religious 
belief —insight and vigor 


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PREFACE 


HIS study of the religious philosophy of William 

James is a revision of a dissertation presented for the 

degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Yale University. 
It attempts to bring together the various strands of James’s 
religious thought, — isolating them on the one hand from those 
parts of his work which are not related to the study of religion, 
and co-ordinating them on the other with the larger outlines 
and main emphases of his world-view. Religion was a topic 
to which James’s mind was constantly turning. References to 
it crop up in discussions where they would be least expected 
and are found widely scattered throughout his works. The 
present study in bringing the most significant of them within 
the compass of a single volume endeavors to reveal the unity 
which underlies all James’s utterances on the subject. 

Some such attempt at synthesis appears to be pertinent 
especially in view of the publication of James’s letters. James 
has frequently been called to account for inconsistency. But 
many apparent discrepancies disappear when one catches a 
glimpse, through these revealing personal documents, of the 
alternating moods to which James was subject and of the in- 
tense human interest which underlay these moods in equal 
measure, different as they were from each other. As is well 
known, James often expressed the belief that philosophy is a 
personal concern, “ more a matter of passionate vision than of 
logic’ and especially susceptible to the personal touch when 
it enters the field of religion. The better we know James’s 
personality, therefore, the more clearly can we understand the 
significance of his religious ideas. To see something of what 
went on in his inner experience as we are able to see it in these 
letters is to gain fresh insight into the unifying purpose of his 
thought. Large use is made in this study of James’s published, 


Vil. 


Vill PREFACE 


letters and in some cases reference is had to letters which have 
not been published. | 

The study of religion has made progress since James’s death 
in 1910 but it has followed in general the lines which he pointed 
out. Particularly is this true of the philosophy as contrasted 
with the psychology of religion. In the latter field James was 
a pioneer, and the development of the subject since his time 
is due in large measure to the momentum which his efforts 
created. But his hypotheses as to the part played in religious 
experience by the subconscious self are out of date as a result 
of the great amount of attention which subconscious activity 
has received from investigators. In the field of the phi- 
losophy of religion, however, the situation is different. The 
issues which James raises here must form an integral part of 
any discussion of the subject, and the emphases he makes are 
of permanent importance. 

The older rationalistic method of attacking religious prob- 
lems is less in vogue today than formerly partly because of 
James’s trenchant attacks upon it. In its place two main 
tendencies can be discerned in the religious thought of our 
time, each taking its cue from a special part of James’s work. 
The first of these is the empirical, the method employed by 
James so successfully in his book on The Varieties of Religious 
Experience. The other is a modification of the empirical 
method and is usually called pragmatic. It follows the lines 
suggested in James’s The Will to Believe, making postulates 
on the basis of experienced need, and it has much to say of 
human values and their possible identification with cosmic 
truth. | 

Two other less clearly formulated features of modern reli- 
gious thinking which also point to James’s influence deserve 
notice as well. The first of these, running parallel to a similar 
tendency in modern art, is toward realism. More is known 
about the universe today than ever before, and with this in- 
crease of knowledge has come an increase in sensitiveness to 
the tragedy of human suffering as well as a heightened sense 
of the futility of much human activity. As a result religion is 


PREFACE ise 


looking the facts of life in the face with a gaze which in its 
unflinching and critical quality is new. In place of the older 
religious world-view with its rounded outlines and ultimate 
syntheses, with its conviction as to the beneficence of nature 
and the final triumphant destiny of man, modern religious 
thought envisages a universe with ragged and jagged edges, 
full of yawning abysses, calculated to fill man with a sense of 
the precariousness rather than the stability of his own posi- 
tion. With such an outlook James’s pluralistic philosophy has 
much in common. The phrase “ problem of evil” rarely ap- 
pears on James’s pages, but the idea is ever hovering in the 
background of his thought. To a generation which is still feel- 
ing the effects of the greatest calamity in history, and which 
regards much of the religious optimism of the past as based on 
illusion, James’s awareness of the tragic element in life and 
refusal to eliminate it from his religious view of the world 
comes with a refreshing sense of reality. 

But while our religious thinking is realistic in one respect 
in another it is romantic. This tendency can be seen in the 
attempt of some of the most recent writers to arrive at religious 
truth through an imaginative treatment of the nuances and 
subtleties which are involved in any venture at describing man’s 
relation to his cosmic environment. The lure of the ultimate 
mystery, the fascination of the transcendent, and the possi- 
bility of socializing this fascination and turning it to practical 
account — such subjects as these are being brought to our 
attention in new and arresting fashion by some of the latest 
books on religion. 

This way of approach dates back to James also, although it 
has developed a technique and consciousness of its own pur- 
poses which he did not have. He paved the way for it, how- 
ever, in his empiricism, and especially in his implicit suggestion 
that the most satisfactory statement of man’s place in the 
cosmos will be found in the most inclusive view of what human 
life really is. Experience is a many-sided thing and can be 
described from many points of vantage. The most complete 
truth about human life and its religious relationships will be 


x PREFACE 


found in that description of it which reaches out the farthest 
and at the same time penetrates the deepest. The meaning of 
the whole human struggle for existence and for value will be 
revealed most fully to that interpreter who with sympathy and 
insight sees the process as a many-sided whole and refuses to 
be content with any single formula or with a description which 
is made from any single point of view. 

James was well qualified to be such an interpreter. Few 
have enjoyed the acute sensitiveness to value which was his 
and not many have been able as was he to envisage the larger 
relationships by which human life is encompassed. The fact 
may be worth dwelling on that James was particularly keenly 
aware of the importance and significance of human volitional 
activity. It is desirable to make this emphasis at a time like 
the present when certain scientific disciplines, claiming direct 
descent from James, are pressing the mechanistic view of 
human life. It is true that James has given us a scientific 
description of experience with the individual consciousness left 
out. But it is well to remember that no one has sketched more 
boldly than he the possibilities which can only be made actual 
through individual personal choice. 

The present study of James is thus interested in treating him 
as the discoverer of meaning and significance in the affective 
and volitional life of human beings. It begins by quoting from 
his works to show that he was subject to alternating moods 
which directly influenced his philosophical and religious views. 
The second chapter, again adducing quotations, traces the im- 
plications of one of his moods as they concern his attitude 
toward that object of philosophical and religious interest, the 
absolute. The third chapter, again with a free use of quota- 
tions, endeavors to discover the basis of James’s interest in 
pluralism. The next three chapters do little more than to 
restate James’s ideas on the subject of human will and purpose 
and to relate these ideas to his general philosophical position. 
Chapter VII shows the development of his conception of God, 
Chapter VIII makes suggestions as to his views on immor- 
tality, Chapter IX points out the connections which mysticism 


PREFACE XI 


makes with his philosophy. The concluding chapter points 
out the indebtedness to James of the religious thought of our 
day. 

A word may be said as to the frequent use of quotations 
from James’s writings. All writers on James draw from him 
freely because he is so very quotable an author. His style is 
inimitable. Furthermore the cogency of his argument fre- 
quently lies in the suggestiveness of his vocabulary. Espe- 
cially when he deals with a subject which like religion is a 
thing of shadings and gradations, of fringes and indefinite 
margins, does James’s power with the written word show itself. 
The vivid flash of his inspiration can be communicated only 
by the means he himself uses for expressing it. Another 
reason for frequent quotations may be offered in the fact that 
some such method is necessary to avoid the criticism which so 
many have incurred of reading their own ideas into him. 
The isolated reference from James is always unreliable. 
Assurance that one has a main emphasis in James is possible 
only when evidence is drawn from more than one part of his 
work. 

My obligations in the preparation of this study have been 
many. In the following list of acknowledgments I wish it to be 
understood, however, that the mention of a name does not 
mean that the person referred to indorses the view of James 
here taken. Indeed only three of those mentioned have read 
the manuscript. With this understanding, then, I wish first of 
all to express to the members of the James family my appre- 
ciation of their willingness to allow me to use unpublished 
material, and especially to Mr. William James of Cambridge 
my gratitude for his kind encouragement and counsel. I 
am very grateful also to Professor Ralph Barton Perry of 
Harvard University and to Mr. Walter B. Briggs of the Wide- 
ner Library for giving me access to the collection of books 
from James’s private collection which is there housed. 

For unpublished material I am indebted to Mrs. Ethel 
Puffer Howes of Scarsdale, N. Y., and to Professor Mary 
Whiton Calkins of Wellesley College, who have allowed me to 


X11 PREFACE 


quote from letters from James in their possession. I am also 
indebted to Professor Charles M. Bakewell of Yale for per- 
mission to use his collection of letters from James to Thomas 
Davidson. Another set of letters of which I have made ex- 
tensive use is a group recently discovered written by James to 
a cousin, Mrs. William H. Prince, when she was living at the 
home of President Julius H. Seelye of Amherst College. 

A part of Chapter VIII of the present volume was used in 
an article in The Journal of Religion. The word “unpub- 
lished” as applied to some of the letters quoted in this chapter 
must be taken with this reservation. Some new unpublished 
material appears in this chapter, however, which was not in- 
cluded in the article. A part of Chapter IX combined with a 
part of Chapter I made up an article published in the Jnter- 
national Journal of Ethics. I am grateful to the editors of 
these periodicals for permission to use the material of these 
articles in the present study. 

I wish also to express my indebtedness to my friend, Pro- 
fessor John M. Warbeke of Mt. Holyoke College for criticisms 
and suggestions, and to Professor Douglas C. Macintosh of 
Yale University to whom my obligation is of the kind a pupil 
can owe only to a great teacher. 

J} Sr abe 


NorTHAMPTON, Mass. 
April, 1926 


CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


eg a ST TEA a 1 A Ite! pe a i OUR eo 


I. THE CONFLICT 


JAMES’S RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY NOT PUT ON A PAR 
WITH THE REST OF HIS WORK BY COMMENTATORS, 
I. MISTAKEN VIEW OF MAIN CURRENTS IN HIS 
THOUGHT, 2. HIS CONFLICT, 3. PLAN OF THIS STUDY, 
4. EVIDENCES FOR THE CONFLICT, 5. ITS REFLECTION 
IN HIS PHILOSOPHY, 8. ITS BEARING ON HIS THEORY 
OF RELIGION, I2. IT HELPS TO EXPLAIN SOME OF HIS 
APPARENT INCONSISTENCIES, I5. AUTO-SOTERISM VS. 
HETERO-SOTERISM, I6. JAMES’S FINAL DECISION FOR 
PLURALISM, 17. THE “‘ SICK SOUL,” 18. USE OF THE 
PRAGMATIC CRITERION, IQ. 


II. THe ABSOLUTE 


JAMES’S HOSTILITY TOWARD IT, 2I. THE APPEAL OF 
THE ABSOLUTE IS IN MANY WAYS EASY TO UNDER- 
STAND, 22. YET THERE IS A FORMALISM IN THE 
ARGUMENTS FOR IT, 23. JAMES ALTERNATED IN HIS 
ATTITUDE TOWARD IT, 24. LATE IN LIFE, NOT EARLY, 
HE DECIDED AGAINST IT, 25. EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND 
RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE ABSOLUTE, 26. MONISM IS 
APPEALING IN ITSELF, 28. ITS MESSAGE FOR THE “ SICK 
SOUL,” 209. ITS INEPTITUDE FOR SERVICE AND ITS 
RIDICULOUSNESS, 30. ITS INCONSISTENCY, 3I. WHY A 
TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCE? 32. ORDINARY PSYCHO- 
LOGICAL EXPERIENCE SHOWS HOW MANY CAN BE ONE, 
34. JAMES’S ANTI-ABSOLUTISTIC FEELING INFLUENCED 
BY RELIGIOUS AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS, 35. THE 
PROBLEM OF EVIL, 36. THE ABSOLUTE AS A HYPOTHE- 
SIS, 38. ROYCE’S ABSOLUTE LEAST UNCONGENIAL, 39. 
THE ABSOLUTE AS ULTIMATE, 40. 


RPPPMPEIE TIN ATIGMS ies rk chi te bbl poe kh mT a Ve 


PROFESSOR SANTAYANA ON JAMES’S OPEN-MINDEDNESS, 
42. WHAT IS JAMES’S PLURALISM? 43. RENOUVIER’S 


PAGE 


21 


42 


X1V 


CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


INFLUENCE, 45. PLURALISM NOT A DEFINITE CONCEP- 
TION, 46. GENERAL ASPECTS OF PLURALISM IN JAMES’S 
MIND, 47. ITS MORE SPECIFIC DENOTATIONS, 49. EX- 
TERNAL RELATIONS, 50. HUMAN SELECTIVE ACTIVITY, 
51. PLURALISM AND AN EXPERIENCE-CONTINUUM, 54. 
A WORLD OF INDEPENDENT PERSONAL BEINGS, 55. 
INDIVIDUALISM, DEMOCRACY, 56. PARTICULARISM, 57. 
JAMES’S SENSITIVENESS TO DISTINCTIONS, 58. VALUES 
OF PLURALISM, 59. CONSISTENCY WITH APPEARANCES, 
60. REAL POSSIBILITIES, INTIMACY, 61. IS THERE PRI- 
ORITY AMONG PLURALISM’S INTERESTS? 62. RELIGIOUS 
VALUE COMES FIRST, 63. PLURALISM AND THE INFI- 
NITE, 65. PLURALISM AND CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT, 66. 


TV: “Dae GER ER Wo ee ee eng 


THE PIVOTAL QUESTION OF METAPHYSICS, 67. ITS RELA- 
TIONS TO VARIOUS PARTS OF JAMES’S PHILOSOPHY, 68. 
NOVELTY ENTERS THE WORLD THROUGH HUMAN 
CHOICES, 70. THE SETTING OF THE PROBLEM IS PSY- 
CHOLOGICAL, ITS SOLUTION ETHICAL, 71. THE FUNC- 
TION OF SELECTION, 72. ATTENTION, 73. “ HOLDING 
AN IDEA FORCIBLY,” 75. CONSCIOUSNESS OF RESPONSI- 
BILITY, 76. CONTINUITY OF PAST AND FUTURE, 77. 
HARMLESSNESS OF CHANCE, 78. DILEMMAS OF DETER- 
MINISM, 79. THE CHESS PLAYER, 80. RENOUVIER’S 
INFLUENCE, 81. 


Vi THEA BELIEVING WIDLLe oie ed oe 


APPLICATION OF FREEDOM TO THE WORLD OF BELIEFS, 
82. HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS: KANT, 83. RENOUVIER, 
REID, HAMILTON, 84. MANSEL, BALFOUR, 85. ROYCE, 
86. PAULSEN, 87. JAMES’S VIEW, 88. PRACTICALITY AND 
SUBJECTIVITY, 89. CREATIVITY, 90. “‘ DUPERY THROUGH 
HOPE VS. DUPERY THROUGH FEAR,” 91. “ FAITH LAD- 
DER ” 92. BELIEF PSYCHOLOGICALLY LIKE ATTENTION, 
05. PRAGMATIC REALISM, 96. WHAT ABOUT PAST 
EVENTS? 97. PRAGMATISM A PROTEST AGAINST IRRELE- 
VANT TRUTH, EMPIRICISM HAS A HIGHER STANDARD 
THAN ABSOLUTISM, 98. PRAGMATISM ESPECIALLY 
ADAPTED TO THE NEEDS OF RELIGION, 99. CRITICS OF 
“THE WILL TO BELIEVE,” I00. THE NEED FOR 
COURAGE, IOI. FAITH IS POSTULATION, I02, 


PAGE 


67 


82 


CONTENTS XV 


CHAPTER PAGE 
VI. THE PuRPOSIVE WILL: VALUES AND TELEOLOGY . . . 104 


JAMES’S SENSITIVENESS TO VALUE, 104. RITSCHL’S USE 
OF VALUE-JUDGMENTS, I05. VALUES SUBJECTIVE, ALSO 
INDIVIDUAL, 106, SOCIAL EMPHASIS TODAY OVERDONE, 
107. MORE ABUNDANT LIVING THE AIM, 108. NEED FOR 
AGGRESSIVENESS AND ESCAPE FROM TEPIDITY, 109. 
HOW DO IDEALS ARISE? I1I0. OBLIGATION DEPENDS ON 
THE NEEDS OF A SENTIENT BEING, III. THE ESSENCE 
OF GOOD IS TO SATISFY DEMAND, I13. A DIVINE 
THINKER BRINGS STABILITY TO THE ETHICAL SYSTEM, 
II4. JAMES’S TELEOLOGY POINTS IN THE SAME DIREC- 
TION, II15. PURPOSE AND THE REFLEX ARC, I16. ANY- 
THING LESS THAN THEISM IS IRRATIONAL, ANYTHING 
GREATER, IMPOSSIBLE, I18. DID JAMES HAVE THE 
RIGHT TO USE HIS PSYCHOLOGY FOR “ EDIFICATION ”’? 
120. THE REAL MUST INCLUDE THE HUMANLY DESIR- 
ABLE, I21I. 


NPD lis SORT Varner OR NEA Uae uae WO aan kee ny abet Deg 


MANY AVENUES IN JAMES’S THOUGHT LEAD TO GOD, 
122. THE FIRST STAGE IN JAMES’S CONCEPTION OF THE 
DEITY — THE WILL TO BELIEVE, 123. UNPUBLISHED 
LETTER TO THOMAS DAVIDSON, 125. PARALLEL STAGE 
IN DEVELOPMENT OF HIS CONCEPTION OF PRAGMATISM, 
128. SECOND STAGE — VARIETIES, I29. PARALLELED 
AGAIN IN HIS PRAGMATIC THEORY, 131. THIRD STAGE 
— A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE, 133. ANSWERS TO QUES- 
TIONNAIRE, I35. CORRESPONDING DEVELOPMENT OF 
MELIORISTIC THEORY, 136. “‘ PIECEMEAL SUPERNATU- 
RALISM,” 137. A LIMITED GOD, 138. THIS NOT AN UN- 
USUAL CONCEPTION IN WESTERN THOUGHT, 139. 
HUME, 140, MILL é¢ al, 141. INFLUENCE ON MODERN 
MONISTS, 142. JAMES EMPHASIZES INTIMACY, PAN- 
PSYCHISM, 143. CONTINUITY OF HUMAN AND DIVINE 
CONSCIOUSNESSES, 144. 


VAL Pee enmee EAD TVR el Ape Ds NN oo STs rok eel UM NS Mt ivertes. TAS 


COMMON APPROACH TO QUESTION OF JAMES’S BELIEF A 
MISTAKEN ONE, 145. UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO DAVID- 
SON, PSYCHICAL RESEARCH, 146. CENSUS OF HALLUCI- 
NATIONS, 147. APPARENTLY SUPERNORMAL KNOWL- 
EDGE OF THE MEDIUM, 148. RELIGIOUS INAPPROPRI- 


XVI 


CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


ATENESS OF PSYCHICAL PHENOMENA, 149. COSMIC 
CONSCIOUSNESS, 150. UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO DAVID- 
SON, I52. PERSONAL APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM 
THROUGH DEMANDS OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CON- 
SCIOUSNESS, 153. TWOFOLD CHARACTER OF JAMES’S 
DEMAND FOR IMMORTALITY, 154. ANSWERS TO QUES- 
TIONNAIRE, I55. LETTER TO FATHER, 156. UNPUB- 
LISHED LETTERS TO MRS, PRINCE, 157-164. JAMES’S 
PHILOSOPHY A NATURAL SETTING FOR BELIEF IN IM- 
MORTALITY, 164. 


TXAM YSTICISM fo) to FE peat een ee Te, aie ane ee 


THE PASSIVE SIDE OF THE CONFLICT, 166. PSYCHOLOGI- 
CAL DESCRIPTION OF THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE, 167. 
ITS PERCEPTUAL CHARACTER, 168. MYSTICISM AND EM- 
PIRICISM, 169. COGNITIVE CONTENT, 170. ITS AUTHOR- 
ITY, 171. UNPUBLISHED LETTERS TO MRS. HOWES, 172- 
175. THREE POINTS OF CONTACT WHICH MYSTICISM 
MAKES WITH JAMES’S RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY, 176. 
(1) IT RECONCILES THE CONFLICTING MOODS, 177. (2) 
IT RELIEVES THE PHENOMENALISM OF JAMES’S PRAG- 
MATISM, 178. MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE BOTH TRANSCEN- 
DENT AND COMMUNICABLE, 181. (3) IT FURNISHES A 
STABLE AUTHORITY FOR JAMES’S ETHICS, 182. THE 
CONNECTION BETWEEN MYSTICISM AND JAMES’S 
THOUGHT IS ILLUMINATING IN BOTH DIRECTIONS, 184 


X. FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS 


XI; Ie 


JAMES’S DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION, 185. THE DIVINE, 
187. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE, 188. 
JAMES’S AESTHETIC INTEREST, 189. HIS SENSE FOR 
THE WHOLE, 190. NEED FOR TANGIBILITY, 191. AND 
FOR CAPACITY TO DO PARTICULAR THINGS, 192. UNPUB- 
LISHED LETTERS TO MRS. PRINCE, 193. THE “‘ MYSTICAL 
GERM,” 194. EVIDENCE FROM THE QUESTIONNAIRE, 
195. JAMES’S INTELLECTUAL RELATION TO HIS FATHER, 
196. THE EARLY HOUSEHOLD DESCRIBED BY HENRY 
JAMES, 197. FOR WM. JAMES THE CULMINATING 
INTEREST WAS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, 198 


MES AND THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT OF TODAY... 
SUMMARY, 199. JAMES’S CATHOLICITY, 201. HIS POPU- 


PAGE 


166 


185 


199 


CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


LAR INFLUENCE, 202. WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS QUAL- 
ITY OF AN EXPERIENCE? 203. LIVELINESS OF THE ISSUE 
TODAY, 204. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE SENSE 
OF SIGNIFICANCE, 206. DESIRE TO HAVE VALUE AND 
EXISTENCE MERGE, 207. PERTINENCE TODAY OF THE 
PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE, 208. CRITICISMS OF IT, 210. 
SIMILARITY OF PRAGMATISM’S INTERESTS TO THOSE OF 
RELIGION, 212. PLURALISM, 213. AND SUBTLETY, 214. 
EMPIRICISM, 215. RELIGION HAS ALWAYS BEEN TAUGHT 
EXPERIMENTALLY, 216. CONDITIONS LAID DOWN IN 
“‘ THE WILL TO BELIEVE ” ARE STILL OPERATIVE, 217. 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE WILL BE A ROMANTIC 
REALISM, 218. 


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XVli 


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RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 
OF WILLIAM JAMES 


““The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are 
the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about 
them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of 
the more shallow man.” 

Pragmatism, p. 108 


‘In a word, ‘Son of Man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto 
thee!’ is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs 
have helped the disciple. But that has been enough to satisfy the 
greater part of his rational need.” 


The Will to Believe and Other Essays, p. 88 


RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 
OF WILLIAM JAMES 


I 
THE CONFLICT 


MONG the many commentaries which the work of 
William James has called forth, few can be found 
which accord his religious philosophy a place of equal 

importance with his psychology, ethics, and theory of knowl- 
edge. The tendency of those commentators who have devoted 
any attention to his religious view has been in general to sepa- 
rate it from the context of his thought as a whole, regarding 
it either as an apologetic, and so-as hardly capable of with- 
standing scientific investigation, or else looking on it as a sort 
of temporary aberration, the vagary of an otherwise brilliant 
mind. The Varieties of Religious Experience, appearing at 
about the same time as Ernest Thompson Seton’s book of 
animal stories, was soon nicknamed ‘“‘ Wild Religions I Have 
Known.” The Will to Believe was parodied as “ Will to De- 
ceive” and “ Will to Make-Believe.” And James’s attempt 
to find in the phenomena of religious experience evidence for 
extra-human activity is called, in one of the standard works 
on the psychology of religion, a “fiasco.” 

A more moderate opinion, though still an unfavorable one, 
has been expressed by a pupil of James in an article sympa- 
thetic to his work as a whole yet containing the observation 
that! “the union of religious mysticism with biological and > 
psychological empiricism is characteristic of James’s work 


I 


eZ RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


from the beginning.” Explaining this comment in conversa- 
tion with the present writer, the author of this article vigor- 
ously asserted his opinion that James’s religious philosophy 
was the least important part of his work, that the “ union ” 
mentioned in the article was rather a “conflict”? between 
James’s mysticism and his scientific training, and that, as 
the article goes on to state, James had had to be “ weaned ”’ 
from the mystical Swedenborgian piety of his father by the 
empiricism of friends like Chauncey Wright and Charles Re- 
nouvier. 

This comment makes an appropriate starting-place for our 
discussion. Its appropriateness for clearing the field of pre- 
liminary difficulties lies, however, in its almost complete in- 
accuracy. It seems, in fact, to state the exact opposite of the 
truth. Evidence which we now have in James’s letters bears 
his own witness to the fact that he was never inclined to be 
a mystic and that the most that can be asserted is the presence 
in him of what he called a mystical ‘‘ germ,” or vicarious in- 
terest in the mystical experiences of others and willingness to 
treat them as on a par with other data in their truth-revealing 
capacity. Furthermore, whatever religious belief James had, 
mystically germinal or otherwise, was very different from 
anything that could be called Swedenborgian. Swedenborg’s 
method of looking to divine revelation for light on problems of 
astronomy and physics is at a far remove from James’s method 
of looking for light on any problem. And the records we have 
of the religious belief of his father, who considered himself 
a follower of Swedenborg, show only a very superficial re- 
semblance to James’s personal views. Furthermore, James’s 
sympathy with his father, intellectually, became greater rather 
than less as he grew older. James himself bears testimony to 
this fact in decisive fashion. 

As to the conflict in James’s thought — there was indeed 
a conflict, but it was not between his religious proclivities and 
his scientific training. The conflict which this discussion will 
endeavor to disclose was a conflict between two divergent re- 
ligious interests. It seems not to have been mentioned by 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 3 


writers on James, yet the evidence for it becomes more con- 
vincing and its importance grows more clear the more one 
reads and reflects on James’s work as a whole. It throws 
light on the pervasiveness of James’s religious interest in all 
his philosophy, and on some of the motives which prompted 
that interest. Like the conflict described in the article men- 
tioned, between the rival claims of science and religion, the 
one which we shall point out has had its analogue in the ex- 
perience of the race and has been discussed, in that aspect, 
by Professor Hoffding in his Philosophy of Religion.’ Its 
significance for the individual, also, has been described by 
Professor Hocking in his chapter on ‘‘ The Principle of Alterna- 
tion” in The Meaning of God in Human Experience. For, like 
the apostle Paul, James seems to have found two souls within 
his breast. Yet, unlike the apostle, James found a decision 
difficult because the aims of both were so high. Not a choice 
between good and evil, but a decision as to the better of two 
good things confronted him. On the one hand he felt the 
press of the active impulses, their aggressive demands for 
power, their challenge to the environment and their eager de- 
sire to remake it. No one knew more keenly than he the in- 
sistent assertiveness of the will to survive, to believe, and to 
achieve. But on the other hand he was not insensitive to the 
more passive desire for assurance, stability, and comfort. In 
the one mood James is ready to scale the highest heaven in his 
quest for value or to penetrate the deepest abyss in his in- 
sistence on the triumphantly conquering and creative ability 
of the human spirit. In the other his whole being longs for 
peace, whether of ecstasy or rationality. But in both cases 
James is religious with the completeness which the intensity 
of his nature required of any mood. 

Our first concern in this study will be with this religious 
conflict. Our next interest will be to examine James’s religious 
thought in more detail, and to observe how the strands of his 
religious belief interweave with the main tendencies of his 
philosophy. We shall see, for example, that what was for 


1 Pp. 88, 157 ff. 


4 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


James an interesting philosophical antithesis, with the weight 
of the appeal resting on one side, became a real dilemma and 
a live issue when the values at stake were religious values. 
Going on to trace James’s active search for the good things 
of life and his struggle to will values into being, we shall dis- 
cover that a problem which is central in James’s thought is 
found by him to be insoluble except on moral and religious 
grounds. We shall then see that the threads of his philosophy 
converge at one point into a defense of religious faith, and that 
his ethics and his purposive view of human life lead him to 
belief in a Deity. Stopping next to examine the results of 
James’s quest we shall notice the kind of God which he found 
and observe that the development of his conception of God 
kept pace with the development of his conception of truth. We 
shall further find, in opposition to the view of some com- 
mentators, that James was the possessor of an active religious 
interest and faith in immortality. Then turning to the more 
passive side of his experience and thought we shall take up 
James’s study of the possibility of God’s intervention in the 
affairs of men, his conclusions regarding mysticism, and their 
significance for his philosophy. Finally, we shall comment on 
the way in which James’s philosophy is adapted to be the set- 
ting for a religious world-view. And the result of our study will 
suggest that James’s religious philosophy can hardly be called 
the least important part of his thought, but that, as integrally 
related to the rest of his thinking, and in places the consum- 
mation of it, his religious philosophy deserves a place in the 
front rank of his work. 

Plunging at once in medias res, let us now consider some 
of the evidence for the existence of the religious conflict in 
James’s mind to which allusion has been made. This chapter 
will not endeavor to trace the conflict in all its detail, but 
rather to suggest some of the ways in which its presence is 
shown. A complete account of it will be possible only as our 
study progresses. In the first place, James himself draws, in 
objective fashion, a contrast between two conflicting philoso- 
phies of life. The clearest account of this contrast is to be 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 5 


found in his introduction to his father’s posthumously pub- 
lished work The Literary Remains of Henry James. In this 
introduction, especially pp. 115 ff., James talks of pluralism as 
‘“‘a view to which we all practically incline when in the full 
and successful exercise of our moral energy.” For “ the life we 
then feel tingling through us vouches sufficiently for itself, and 
nothing tempts us to refer it to a higher source.” But then, as 
he goes on to explain, “ healthy-mindedness is not the whole 
of life; and the morbid view, as one may by contrast call it, 
asks for a philosophy very different from that of absolute 
moralism.” It asks, that is to say, for a monism, since “ to sug- 
gest personal will and effort to one ‘ all sicklied o’er’’ with the 
sense of weakness, of helpless failure, and of fear, is to suggest 
the most horrible of things to him. What he craves is to be 
consoled in his very impotence, to feel that the Powers of the 
Universe recognize and secure him, all passive and failing as 
he is.” And tthe description becomes more than an objective 
statement as James continues: “ Well, we are all potentially 
such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with 
lunatics and prison-inmates.” The demand for assurance which 
springs from the sense of our own helplessness is, as we 
shall see in detail, in James’s view a demand for a monistic 
philosophy. 

The whole passage from which these excerpts are taken is a 
very illuminating one, and its careful study is recommended to 
anyone who wishes to watch the development of James’s 
thought. Among the items of especial interest, we may note in 
the first place that while James wrote it as early as the summer 
of 1884, it contains clear references to the pragmatic criterion 
of truth, although the name “pragmatism” does not appear 
in James’s writings until fourteen years later, in the address 
delivered at Berkeley on “‘ Philosophical Conceptions and Prac- 
tical Results.” In the second place, the distinction between 
monism and pluralism is already “the deepest of all philo- 
sophic differences,” and pluralism is already championed with 
a fair degree of enthusiasm. But the pluralism here described, 
contrary to the expectation of those writers who relate plural- 


6 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


ism primarily to his theory of knowledge, finds its excuse for 
being in the nature of the moral struggle; it is a pluralism, 
that is to say, which is moral rather than epistemological. 
Third, the moral basis of what later came to be known as 
“radical empiricism” is also present here. The moralist 
wishes, as James says, to feel his goods and evils “‘to be real 
goods and evils, with their distinction absolutely preserved.” 
There must be no defining of one in terms of the other; the 
relations between the two must be external, not constitutive. 
This, as we shall see later, is one of the cardinal requirements 
of radical empiricism. Fourth, and most important for our 
present purposes, James here dwells at length on the struggle 
which he calls one between “ religion”? and “ moralism,” and 
hints at the possibility that his own sympathies may be divided. 
The claims of active pluralism are set forth with evident en- 
thusiasm, yet passive monism is not neglected, for “‘ we are 
all potentially such sick men.” The question at once arises: 
Is there evidence that James with all his enthusiasm for plu- 
ralism, ever tired of the struggle and felt the need of rest- 
ing upon the everlasting arms? Did religion ever appeal 
to him as a means to solace rather than as a means to 
conquest? 

It seems so to have appealed to him in certain moods, even 
at a comparatively early age. From the objective description of 
the dualism let us turn now to evidences of an actual struggle in 
James’s own mind. An interesting letter, written when he was 
twenty-six, to Thomas W. Ward, suggests that the active life 
may be but a substitute for the deeper yearnings of the spirit. 
“‘We long for sympathy,” James here says, “ for a purely per- 
sonal communication, first with the soul of the world, and then 
with the soul of our fellows.” * During this same period, while 
he was in the late twenties, James went through the mental suf- 
fering which thirty years afterward in The Varieties of Re- 
ligious Experience he was able to describe so graphically. The 
account in the Varieties is given on pages 160 and 161 and is 
there attributed to ‘‘a French correspondent,” but was later 


2 The Letters of William James, 1: 130 ff, 


OF WILLIAM FAMES “4 


known to be from James himself.* Of his own experience, then, 
James writes: 

“¢ , . there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it 
came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. 
Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epilep- 
tic patient whom I had seen in the asylum. ... That shape 
am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend 
me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it 
struck for him. ... After this the universe was changed for 
me altogether. ... I have always thought that this experi- 
ence of mine had a religious bearing. ... I mean that the 
fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not clung to 
scripture-texts like ‘ The eternal God is my refuge,’ etc., ‘ Come 
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,’ etc., ‘ I am the 
resurrection and the life,’ etc., I think I should have grown 
really insane.” 

Here is as striking evidence as we could wish for the influ- 
ence of the melancholy mood upon James at an early period. 
But this mood, though powerful, fortunately was transient. 
At other times the active impulses were in the ascendancy. 
Contrast with the last passage this buoyant quotation from a 
letter written in 1878 to Mrs. James: 

““T have often thought that the best way to define a man’s 
character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral 
attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most 
deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there 
is a voice inside which speaks and says ‘ This is the real me.’ 

This characteristic attitude in me always involves an 
element of active tension, of holding my own, as it were, and 
trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make 
it a full harmony, but without any guaranty that they will. 
Make it a guaranty — and the attitude immediately becomes to 
my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guar- 
anty, and I feel (provided I am ziberhaupt in vigorous condi- 
tion) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to 
do and suffer anything, which translates itself physically by a 

S.Ct, Letters; 15 145; 


8 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


kind of stinging pain inside my breast-bone (don’t smile at 
this — it is to me an essential element of the whole thing! ) and 
which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which I can 
give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the deepest 
principle of all active and theoretic determination which I 
possess.” * 

James gives us, then, first a description of the conflict be- 
tween two views of life, and second a suggestion of a reflection 
of this conflict in the alternating moods of his own experience. 
Let us now observe one or two evidences of the way in which 
this conflict was making itself felt in his philosophical thought. 
An indication of the manner in which it affected his attempt 
to formulate a theory of knowledge is found in his review of 
Lewes’ Problems of Life and Mind written for the Atlantic 
Monthly in 1875 and now reprinted in Collected Essays and 
Reviews.’ This review also contains a most interesting anti- 
cipation of the famous treatment in The Will to Believe of the 
problem of religious assurance. Speaking of the conception of 
Substance, as an attempt to meet the demand for security, 
James says: 

““Common sense craves for a stable conception of things. 
We desire to know what to expect. ... Even in regard to 
the mass of accidents which must be expected to occur in some 
shape but cannot be accurately prophesied in detail, we set 
our minds at rest, by saying that the world with all its events 
has a substantial cause; and when we call this cause God, 
Love, or Perfection, we feel secure that whatever the future 
may harbor, it cannot at bottom be inconsistent with the 
character of this term.” 

But a few paragraphs further on we come upon the inter- 
esting assertion that ‘‘ skepticism or unrest . . . can always 
have the last word.” So that “ . . . at a certain point most of 
us get tired of the play, resolve to stop, and assuming some- 
thing for true, pass on to a life of action based on that.” There 
is a volitional element, then, which asserts itself toward the 
solution of problems of knowledge as well as of conduct, for: 

4 Letters, 1: 199-200. ®: Pp. 400r 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 9 


“In practical life we despise a man who will risk nothing, even 
more than one who will heed nothing. May it not be that in 
the theoretic life the man whose scruples about flawless ac- 
curacy of demonstration keep him forever shivering on the 
brink of Belief is as great an imbecile as the man at the op- 
posite pole, who simply consults his prophetic soul for the 
answer to everything? What is this but saying that our 
opinions about the nature of things belong to our moral life? ” 
And may we not query, as aptly, whether they do not belong 
to our religious life, when we are forced to postulate a “‘ God, 
Love, or Perfection ” to make the future secure? Active effort 
and assurance of safety, our nature demands them both; 
and the religious and moral demand is paralleled by that which 
is implied in the knowing process. 

The twofold demand, in its relation to the problem of 
knowledge, is further dealt with in the first of the two essays 
which have been printed under the title ‘“‘ The Sentiment of Ra- 
tionality,” this first one having appeared in Mind, for 1879, and 
as a reprint in Collected Essays and Reviews.’ The most im- 
portant contrast in the field of knowledge is here represented 
as that between simplicity and clearness, the one implying 
monism, the other pluralism. Hegel is cited as having shown 
the most glaring example of “hypertrophy of the unifying 
passion,” while Renouvier is called “ the greatest living insister 
on the principle that unity in our account of things shall not 
overwhelm clearness.” Both demands, for unity and for dis- 
tinctness, are fundamental, we are told; and no system of phi- 
losophy which violates either can hope to gain universal ac- 
ceptance. If our need for unity could be satisfied, we might 
realize the sense of restfulness which a monism like that of 
the Upanishads offers. But James thinks it cannot be real- 
ized in the knowing process. Even Hegel’s “ heroic effort ”’ is 
doomed to failure. “‘The bottom of Being” is left logically 
opaque to us,” and the volitional element must be brought 
into play when we realize that it is “‘something which we 
simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to 

6 Pp. 83 ff. 


10 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible.” Here 
it is that pluralism issues its challenge and dares us to advance 
into the unknown, for “‘ in this confession lies the lasting truth 
of Empiricism, and in it Empiricism and imaginative Faith 
join hands. The logical attitude of both is identical, they both 
say there is a plus ultra beyond all we know, a womb of un- 
imagined other possibility.” ’ 

Yet the desire for the restfulness of unity is insistent, and, 
as James goes on to show, men will endeavor to find satisfac- 
tion in the attainment of an “ uttermost datum ” even though 
it be in itself inexplicable and point to a further mystery be- 
yond. “Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, 
God’s fiat being in physics and morals such an uttermost 
datum.” And the close relation of the demand for unity made 
in the knowing process with that of religious experience ap- 
pears when the mystic’s endeavor after unity is considered. 
For, as James says, “‘ The peace of rationality may be sought 
through ecstasy when logic fails. To religious persons of every 
shade of doctrine moments come when the world as it is seems 
so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by the heart so 
rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish, nay, 
the intellect itself is hushed to sleep —as Wordsworth says, 
‘Thought is not, in enjoyment it expires.’ Ontological emo- 
tion so fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer 
overlap it and put her girdle of interrogation-marks around 
existence.” ® 

In the second essay published under the title of “‘ The Senti- 
ment of Rationality,” we find this dualism appearing again. For 
James here goes on to point out that “ rationality ” implies a 
practical as well as theoretic kind of satisfaction. An idea or 
a system of philosophy will be judged “ rational” according as 
it satisfies the particular practical need of the person who is 
judging. And the practical needs which a system of philosophy 
is equipped to satisfy fall into two classes: it can satisfy the 
need for intimacy, as does idealism in placing a universe of 


7 Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 128. 
8 Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 133. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES II 


thought at the command of the thinker; or it can satisfy the 
need for activity, as is accomplished by empiricism, with its 
postulation of new worlds to conquer. ‘‘ The strife of these 
two kinds of mental temper,” says James, “ will, I think, al- 
ways be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on 
the reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and 
that we can act with; others, on the opacity of brute fact that 
we must react against.’ ° 

So much for the reflection in James’s early attacks on the 
problem of knowledge of the conflicting ideas which we have 
described as warring within him. The next passage to con- 
sider comes from his psychological description of the ego. 
James’s Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, is not only 
still a standard text-book in that subject but is one of the 
most convincing scientific descriptions ever written of the es- 
sentially creative function of the human organism. But while 
the idea of the creative activity of consciousness is dominant 
in this work, one also finds suggestions as to human depend- 
ence in James’s description of the fundamental human desire 
for recognition from the ‘‘ Absolute Mind,” the ‘“ Great Com- 
panion.” “ We hear, in these days of scientific enlightenment,” 
says James, “‘a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of 
prayer; and many reasons are given us why we should not 
pray, whilst others are given us why we should. But in all this 
very little is said of the reason why we do pray, which is simply 
that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, in spite 
of all that ‘science’ may do to the contrary, men will con- 
tinue to pray to the end of time. ... The impulse to pray 
is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the inner- 
most of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social 
sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal 
world.” *° 

We have thus found James both describing the conflicting 
demands of the active and passive moods and giving evidence 
of the alternation of these moods in himself. We have also 
found a reflection of this conflict in James’s description of the 

9 The Will to Believe, etc., p. go. 10 t: 316. 


12 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


‘two needs which are implied in the knowing process, the need 
for self-assertion and the need for security, and in his sug- 
gestion of the alternation between creation and dependence 
in the experience of the self.; The religious bearing of the con- 
flict will be made more clear by following up some of the 
comments James makes on the religious implications of plural- 
ism compared with those of monism. The contrast is sharply 
drawn in James’s great book on religion, The Varieties of Re- 
ligious Experience, but indications of it appear earlier as well. 
A letter to Professor G. H. Howison in 1885 is interesting for 
its suggestion that pluralism was at that time becoming, in 
James’s view, not merely a “ moralistic”? philosophy, as he 
had called it in his introduction to his father’s book, but a 
means to truly religious value. ‘‘ Make the world a Pluralism,” 
James exclaims in his letter, “and you forthwith have an ob- 
ject to worship. Make it a Unit, on the other hand, and 
worship and abhorrence are equally one-sided and equally 
legitimate reactions. Indifferentism is the true condition 
of such a world.” And since this is so, “I prefer to stick 
to the wooden finitude of an ultimate pluralism, because that 
at least gives me something definite to worship and fight 
tor" 11 

The religious bearing of a “ moralistic ” and therefore plu- 
ralistic philosophy is further brought out in the essay on “‘ The 
Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” first published in 
the International Journal of Ethics in 1891 and now reprinted 
in The Will to Believe and Other Essays. Here James main- 
tains that “in a merely human world without a God, the ap- 
peal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulat- 
ing power.”’ For only when we believe in a God do “ the more 
imperative ideals”’ utter their ‘‘ penetrating, shattering, trag- 
ically challenging note of appeal.” ‘“‘ The capacity of the 
strenuous mood,” James tells us, “lies so deep down among 
our natural human possibilities that even if there were no 
metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, 
men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, 


11 Letters, I: 238. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 13 


and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities 
olzest. > 

Obviously it is not the Comforter but the God of battles 
who is the object of devotion of the moral man in a pluralistic 
world. The essays published with The Will to Believe present 
this view on the whole fairly consistently. In The Varieties of 
Religious Experience the contrasting attitude receives more at- 
tention. Indeed this book describes both points of view so 
persuasively that it is difficult at times to see with which side 
James’s allegiance lies. Never, it is safe to say, has the gospel 
of healthy-mindedness been more eloquently set forth. But 
in like manner never has the “sick soul” been described with 
such evident sensitiveness to its needs. Which is the deeper 
mood — the active or the contemplative? Through which do 
we attain a truer insight into the heart of things? Is religion 
more consonant with the demands of our nature and more 
representative of whatever universal reality there may be when 
it gives us comfort, or when it encourages us to a more ag- 
gressive activity? Shall we rest on the everlasting arms or 
put on the whole armor of God? This is the question which 
speaks through every page of the Varieties, and in it we hear 
an echo of the conflict which, as we claim, was so pervasive 
of James’s thought. 

It is a little surprising at first to find that ‘‘ healthy-minded- 
ness” as James views it in the Varieties is aligned with plural- 
ism. One might have supposed that the insistence that life is 
worth while would involve the assertion that all is good. But 
it is significant that James does not look at the matter in this 
way. Healthy-mindedness, in his opinion, admits the fact of 
evil as an obstruction to be removed. It refuses to gloss over 
its existence, but it refuses also to magnify its importance. 
So James tells us that ‘‘ the gospel of healthy-mindedness . . . 
casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view. Whereas the 
monistic philosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, 
as Hegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, 
as an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and 

12 The Will to Believe, etc., pp. 212-3. 


14 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


kept consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the 
final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say any- 
thing of the sort. Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and 
not to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final 
system of truth.” ** 

So healthy-mindedness, or at least the kind in which James 
believes, is deliberately and aggressively optimistic. But, as 
James goes on to remind us, optimism may be very shallow 
and very blind. “‘ How can things so insecure as the successful 
experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage?” “ In the 
healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of 
illness, danger and disaster are always interposed? ” “‘ The 
healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense 
of precariousness.” “Failure, then, failure! so the world 
stamps us at every turn.” And then in a strain reminiscent of 
the passage quoted above from the Principles of Psychology, 
we read ‘‘ The God of many men is little more than their court 
of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their 
failures by the opinion of this world. ... We turn to the 
All-Knower who knows our bad, but knows this good in us 
also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with repentance on 
his mercy: only by an All-Knower can we finally be judged. 
So the need of a God very definitely emerges from this sort 
of experience in life.” * 

These experiences of failure and futility, these glimpses into 
the horror of insanity with their first-hand intimations of 
the awful abyss of agony into which so many have fallen, 
point to a deeper stratum of reality than that in which healthy- 
mindedness has its roots. “‘ How irrelevantly remote seem all 
our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral con- 
solations in the presence of a need like this. Here is the real 
core of the religious problem: Help! Help! No prophet can 
claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will 
have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. 
But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the 
complaint, if it is to take effect; and that seems a reason why 

13 Varieties, p. 132. 14 Pp. 136 ff. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 15 


the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and 
miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be 
displaced. Some constitutions need them too much.” *® 

Passages like this bring out an inner dilemma in each mem- 
ber of the conflict. The “sick soul” through its own agony 
sees that the universe is not wholly good and understands the 
shallowness of monism. But by the same token it cries out 
for the relief which only monism can give, for the “ peace of 
rationality ’’ which passeth rationalizing. Its dilemma is: A 
God who saves is impossible, yet a God who saves is neces- 
sary. The negation and the demand are twin elements in its 
cry. And less poignantly but similarly, the dilemma is present 
in healthy-mindedness. Salvation must not be assured, “‘ there 
must be no guaranty,” or the tang and the zest which are the 
heart of healthy-mindedness are gone. But salvation must be 
achieved; I, the individual, must assert my reality in a way 
that will endure. For, as James once said, a “nameless ‘ un- 
heimlichkeit ’ comes over us at the thought of there being noth- 
ing eternal in our final purposes.” *® I must achieve, yet, as 
the apostle Paul would have put it, not I, but One who worketh 
in me! 

These passages have all been drawn from James’s works pub- 
lished before 1903, the latest from which quotation has been 
made being the Varieties which appeared in 1902. They re- 
flect something of the relation of what we have called the 
varying active and passive moods in James’s experience to the 
philosophic antithesis which appears so frequently in his works. 
As the question of monism or pluralism James often refers to 
it as the most pregnant question in philosophy, and he alludes 
nearly as often to its variants, the strife between rationalism 
and empiricism, or between absolutism and individualism. The 
antithesis, and the personal dilemma it made for James is worth 
examining. It is of interest in the first place for the student 
of James, since it suggests a way in which at least some of the 
contradictions in his works may be explained in terms of this 
struggle of two conflicting loyalties. A remark which one fre- 

15 P, 162. 16 Will to Believe, etc., p. 83. 


16 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


quently hears today is that whatever James has asserted on 
one page he has denied on another. Like Emerson with whom 
he has often been compared (and just as often been con- 
trasted) James is commonly believed to have regarded con- 
sistency as an overrated fetish, the hobgoblin of small minds. 
Yet much of the inconsistency which the critics have pro- 
claimed is only apparent. The “ center of the author’s vision ” 
which he has told us it is so important to catch can be found 
in James himself if we can get a glimpse of the intimate and 
personal opinion. As he so often insisted, philosophy was for 
him more a matter of passionate vision than of logic. If the 
vision alternated in intensity and range yet alternated in two 
clearly defined directions the center with its controlling unity 
should be easier for us to grasp. And in the second place the 
conflict is of interest on its own account. To borrow a phrase 
from Professor Hocking’s classroom (a phrase which, how- 
ever, so far as the writer knows, Professor Hocking has not 
applied to James), the conflict may be described as that be- 
tween two contrasting types of religious thought — “ auto-so- 
teric”’ and “ hetero-soteric.”” The former is humanistic, seek- 
ing salvation through its own effort, represented in James by 
the belief in the purposive nature of the human organism and 
its creative power. The latter is more mystical, reaching out 
for help from a higher Power, and represented in James, as 
we have seen, in his desire for stability and in his belief in 
the actual occurrence and in the value when they do occur of 
what he calls “ saving experiences ” in the religious life. | 
The most important point to notice here is that this longing 
for religious assurance was actually at times translated in 
James’s mind into sympathy for the monistic point of view in 
metaphysics. Apparently monism appealed to him, however, 
almost entirely for its religious value. There were times when 
James felt the need of the kind of religious support which only 
a monistic view could bring. That this doughty champion of 
pluralism, should at any time in his life have been inclined to 
see the good in monism is interesting enough. But that mon- 
ism should have appealed to him especially because of its re- 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 17 


ligious value is particularly interesting for our purposes. It 
suggests that religious values made a remarkably direct appeal 
to James and that in their light he was able to see virtue where 
none had existed before. And if the intimately personal de- 
sire for reconciliation and atonement was able at any time to 
incline him toward monism, we may expect to find his re- 
ligious vision influencing him in other ways. This indeed is 
wholly in line with James’s own view of what philosophy really 
is. “‘ A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate char- 
acter,” he has told us, it cannot be a mere “ technical matter ” 
but must embody “ the sense of what life honestly and deeply 
means.” 

But now, it may be asked, if James really felt the force of 
this kind of religious appeal, why do we not find a more clearly 
formulated expression of it in his work? James considers him- 
self a pluralist and indeed has always been regarded as plural- 
ism’s most active defender. How is this possible if he really 
sympathized at times with the other side? The answer is 
simply that the conflict, while a real one, was not toward the 
end of his life an indecisive one. James chose pluralism, as we 
shall see, because the values it brought in its train seemed to 
him on the whole to be more important than those of monism. 
And the fact is, of course, as we shall also see, that we do find 
traces of the monistic inclination even in those works where 
pluralism is most vigorously defended. May we not also dis- 
cern a possible trace of bitterness in James’s onslaughts on 
monism? At times he gives the impression of making the more 
savage attack because he would so willingly have defended it, 
since its benefits, if they could have come untrammeled, would 
have been so acceptable. 

A word should be said here as to the use of the term “sick 
soul”? which we have come upon in this discussion. Its use, 
together with the expression ‘‘ morbid-mindedness,” appears to 
imply a negative evaluation of the passive mood from the out- 
set. But before we discount the ability of the “sick soul” to 
point the way to truth we must remember, first, that these 
terms did not connote for James any unfitness for vision or 


18 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


insight. The pathological is to be evaluated not by its roots 
but by its fruits. Is the insight of the “sick soul” more clear 
than that of the healthy mind, and does it lead us to more 
fruitful relations with reality? These are the significant ques- 
tions for the point at issue. When his sympathies are on the 
side of monism James indicates that its insight is both more 
clear and more comprehensive. “ It seems to me,” he writes 
in the Varieties, “that we are bound to say that morbid-mind- 
edness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its 
survey is the one that overlaps.” For, “even though one be 
quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that 
healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophic doctrine, be- 
cause the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for 
are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the 
best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of 
our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” *” 

Then again we must not take the adjectives “sick” and 
“morbid” too literally. A ‘‘ morbid” state of mind in this 
sense is one which recognizes the fact and the force of evil 
with a peculiar vividness, but not necessarily in an abnormal 
way. Indeed James was himself often enough a “sick soul” 
and “‘ morbid-minded ” in the sense in which these expressions 
are used. The terms are used simply to emphasize the ex- 
tremes to which passivity goes. There are moods when the 
facts of evil will not be glossed over but insist on making their 
presence felt and in impressing on us our own helplessness be- 
fore them. “ Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every foun- 
tain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: 
a touch of nausea ...a whiff of melancholy, things that 
sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they .. . often 
have an appalling convincingness.” 

These quotations have given us not merely evidence of the 
existence of the conflict itself, but some suggestions as to the 
standards which James could be expected to employ in com- 
ing to a decision. Obviously clearness and comprehensiveness 
of insight furnish one criterion. Blindness to the facts of life 


17 Pf. 163. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 19 


is an insuperable objection to any philosophy. But another cri- 
terion is fully as important. The pragmatic test as applied 
by James deserves a moment of our attention here, for a part 
of our study will attempt to bring out the close relation of 
James’s pragmatism to his religious philosophy and in so doing 
will point to the facility with which pragmatism is brought to 
bear upon religious problems. 

Pragmatism, as we noticed before, is clearly suggested in 
James’s introduction to his father’s work. “ By their fruits,” 
James here asserts, “‘ ye shall know them.” We must appeal to 
the “ umpire of practice.” Pragmatic temporalism also is im- 
plied in the phrase “ Solvitur ambulando.” In these and in the 
later passages, James is faithful to the pragmatic view that the 
truth of a theory is not knowable apart from its effects for life. 
There is no theoretic difference without a practical difference, 
and the practical differences in our experience are the best 
clues we have to differences of theory in all life, but particu- 
larly in the religious life. The decisive question is: Which kind 
of difference is practically more important and so functions as 
more satisfactory evidence of a difference in ultimate reality? 
In the matter of this conflict which has a more desirable effect 
in practical life, assurance and comfort or renewed energy 
and strengthened will? Which is the greater good? For, since 
truth is a species of good, the greater good will be the more 
true. To be sure, “greater good’ must here be carefully de- 
fined, and logical consistency as well as conformity to the rest 
of the data of experience must not be overlooked. But con- 
sistency and conformity are only two out of many demands. 
And when we are confronted by questions of religious import 
we frequently find that there are few data or “ facts,” so that 
there may be no question of conformity, and we further find 
that logic is sometimes irrelevant, while our emotional and 
volitional demands are always relevant and always insistent. 
Pragmatism recognizes both the force and the pertinency of 
these demands and so is especially well qualified to act as 
arbiter in religious questions. 

In his later works James does not merely suggest, but de- 


20 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


finitely brings into play the pragmatic criterion. In Pragma- 
tism *® and in A Pluralistic Universe **® he devotes more time 
and space than ever before to a discussion of the monistic- 
pluralistic antithesis, but the conflict now rages not so much 
over “monism” as over ‘‘ the absolute.” The final decision 
is definitely in favor of the pluralistic, melioristic, empirical 
view of life and the universe. But the decision does not come 
without a struggle. The absolute asserts its claim to be heard, 
and makes its appeal, especially in its religious capacity. 

To suggest, however, that James was in any way sensitive 
to the appeal of the absolute is to make a statement which, in 
view of his well-known attacks upon that entity, will require 
further examination. To a study of James’s relations with the 
absolute, accordingly, we must now turn our attention. 


18 Published in 1907. 19 Published in 1909. 


IT 
THE ABSOLUTE 


O JAMES, in his vigorous moods, the absolute was 
anathema. At such times, when “the pulse of life 
tingling through him vouched for itself,” the hypothe- 

sis of an all-knower or an all-doer or an all-sustainer was 
absolute only in its absurdity. ‘“ Damn the absolute! ” he ex- 
claimed to Royce, one morning at Chocorua, and some years 
later his Oxford audience was scandalized to hear him ejacu- 
late, in the course of his public lecture, ‘‘ Let the absolute bury 
its absolute! ” “‘ A metaphysical monster ” was his name for 
Bradley’s edition of this Being; a “ will o’ the wisp,” one of the 
“lights that do mislead the morn” and the ‘‘ mad absolute” 
he calls it in other connections. ‘“‘ Why does the Absolute Unity 
make its votaries so much more conceited at having attained 
it?” he asks, in a letter to Renouvier; and to Hodgson, in a 
phrase reminiscent of Ritschl, he observes: “‘ There is no super- 
stition like the idolatry of the Whole! ” 

It is not difficult, even in this age of ‘‘ power, speed and util- 
ity,” to understand the fascination which the absolute has 
exercised over minds philosophically inclined. Absolutism has 
been defined by Professor J. B. Baillie as “a method of in- 
terpreting reality which starts from the point of view of, and 
constructs a system by direct reference to, the complete unity 
of the whole.” * In spite of the formalism of this or any other 
definition of the attempt to frame a notion of total reality, it 
must be evident that such an attempt springs from needs which 
are fundamental in human nature. In the first place, there is 

1 Art. “Absolutism” in Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. 


21 


22 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


the intellectual need. As thinking beings, we must classify. 
In order to understand we must relate. We make intellectual 
progress by bringing apparently diverse particulars under a 
single heading. Why then should we not reach out for the all- 
inclusive category, the principle by which all particulars are 
made knowable, knowable to a great Someone at least, if not 
to us? So to do is, indeed, merely to assert the triumphantly 
conquering ability of the human reason. It is to follow the 
fruitful example of the early Milesians, precursors of the great- 
est humanistic movement that the world has known, for whom 
the cosmos itself presented no insuperable difficulties, but who 
proceeded in the belief that the world was one and that this 
oneness was expressed in a formula which the human intellect 
was equipped to discover. This implicit faith in the invinci- 
bility of the human spirit as to its intellectual function might 
be expected to find in James an enthusiastic response. 

And absolutism brings, along with its conviction that the 
world is rational, the promise that it is good. There is no 
deeper question than that attributed to F. W. H. Myers, ‘Is 
the universe friendly? ” Absolutists are sure that it is. The 
rational, after all, is the good. How could it be otherwise? As 
to whether this means that the words “ absolute ” and ‘‘ God ” 
are interchangeable, absolutists differ among themselves. The 
view that they are is finely expressed by Professor Pringle- 
Pattison in his Gifford lectures on The Idea of God, where 
mankind is pictured as endeavoring, from the earliest days to 
our own, to probe the riddle of existence. Man, says this ab- 
solutist, “asks the meaning of it all, and he names the name 
of God.” One answer suffices for the final question raised by 
metaphysics, by the problems of knowledge, by religion. It 
is absolutism’s ability to make man feel at home in the uni- 
verse, its assurance of cosmic support for spiritual ideals, its 
apparent capacity to offer a final and satisfactory answer to 
man’s most insistent questionings that James has in mind when 
he talks of the assurance and sense of stability which belief in 
the absolute brings. 

But while the attempt to reach and know an all-encompass- 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 23 


ing Reality has, especially since the days of Anselm, had a 
religious as well as an intellectual meaning, the attempt itself 
has been made, James seems to think, along too exclusively 
logical, that is, formal and abstract lines. As one reads the 
work of apologists for the absolute, the impression comes that 
this criticism of James’s has much to back it up. The argu- 
ment proceeds by analysis and counter-analysis. Ultimate real- 
ity is One and all, for it cannot be anything else. If it were 
many, we should have a meaningless chaos without an under- 
lying unity. If it were less than all, it would imply the exist- 
ence of that by which it is less than all. And so the argument 
goes, working always for consistency in the propositions with 
which it deals. But it is necessary, as others have pointed out, 
not only to be consistent, but to have all the facts to be con- 
sistent with. Logic is of the highest importance, but logic it- 
self draws its data from the world of human experience. This 
seems to be the starting-point of James’s objection. And 
coupled with this is what might almost, in the vernacular of the 
day, be described as a “ complex ” against the absolute’s rigid- 
ness and completeness. The conception of an “ All-Knower ” 
satisfies certain religious moods, but the determinism and lack 
of scope for individual activity which it implies are incompat- 
ible with the moral demands we make upon the cosmos. Any 
all-inclusive philosophy, any belief which emphasizes the one- 
ness of reality, any monistic idealism, absolutism, or imper- 
sonal mechanistic scheme arouses James’s ire. In the essay on 
“Is Life Worth Living? ” in a manner worthy of J. S. Mill 
himself he calls the world of nature a “harlot,” to whom “ we 
owe no allegiance,” and this antipathy to a world so unre- 
lieved by any sign of responsivness to human and moral con- 
cerns is reflected and magnified in his attitude to any ultimate 
reality which failed to allow for the possibility of human crea- 
tive achievement. In spite of the efforts of his absolutistic 
friends, Royce, for example, and Miss Mary W. Calkins, to 
whom in an unpublished letter he acknowledges his indebted- 
ness, James to the end affirmed his belief that the absolute 
failed to meet vital human needs. In his own inimitable manner 


24 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


he wrote,” ‘‘ The through-and-through universe seems to suffo- 
cate me with its infallible, impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its 
necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, 
make me feel . . . as if I had to live in a large seaside board- 
ing-house with no private bedroom in which I might take 
refuge from the society of the place. ... Certainly, to my 
personal knowledge, all Hegelians are not prigs, but I some- 
how feel as if all prigs ought to end, if developed, by becoming 
Hegelians. .. . It [the ‘through-and-through’ philosophy | 
seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a 
thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos 
with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. The ‘ freedom’ 
we want to see there is not the freedom, with a string tied 
to its leg and warranted not to fly away, of that philosophy. 
‘Let it fly away,’ we say, ‘ from us/ What then?’” 

With the possible exception of F. C. S. Schiller, the ‘‘ exuber- 
ance ’”’ of whose “ polemic wit” in this regard James himself 
eyed a little askance, no other writer has given more trenchant 
expression to his anti-absolutistic feeling. And surely no other 
writer has presented his opinions so colorfully or in a form so 
likely to make a lasting impression on the reader. So well are 
James’s attacks on the absolute remembered and so widespread 
is the opinion of him as the absolute’s chief antagonist, that 
it comes as something of a surprise to find that his opposition 
was not manifest all through his life, and that there were times, 
as we have hinted, when he assumed an attitude of receptive- 
ness to the monistic appeal. 

Some of the evidence of this alternation we have traced in 
the previous chapter, observing that a real conflict went on in 
James’s mind which shows in early works and as late as the 
Varieties published in 1902. James continued, until his death in 
1910, to state clearly and forcefully the issues of the great 
antithesis of which the conflict we have described formed one 
aspect. But in Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe, his 
last two books which contain a continuous dicussion and sus- 
tained argument on the subject, James throws the weight of 


2 Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 276 ff. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 25 


his influence on one side. Not that he fails to come out clearly 
for pluralism before this final period. The standpoint of The 
Will to Believe and Other Essays is avowedly pluralistic. But 
in these last books an unusually large amount of attention is 
given to the antithesis, and the reasons for deciding in favor 
of one member are given in some detail. In Pragmatism the 
opposition between rationalism and empiricism is made the 
background for a study of the effectiveness of the pragmatic 
method for settling metaphysical disputes, and the verdict is 
rendered for empiricism. And in A Pluralistic Universe the 
quarrel of the absolute with pluralism is settled in favor of 
the latter. Yet in these works where the decision is so def- 
initely adverse, the absolute is given its due and its claims 
on men’s imagination and sympathy are heard. 

Neither in its relation to the problem of knowledge nor in 
its role as a metaphysical and religious Being did the absolute 
finally make any coercive demand on James, though there 
were periods in his life when each aspect made its own appeal 
to him. The absolute as all-knower early engaged James’s at- 
tention, and for a time his allegiance. In a review of Royce’s 
The Religious Aspect of Philosophy printed in the Atlantic 
Monthly for 1885 and now reprinted in Collected Essays and 
Reviews* he says, apropos of Royce’s idealistic reasoning: 
“The more one thinks, the more one feels that there is a real 
puzzle here. Turn and twist as we will, we are caught in a 
tight trap. .. . An ‘ Over-Soul’ of whose enveloping thought 
our thought and the things we think of are alike fractions, — 
such is the only hypothesis that can form a basis for the reality 
of truth and of error in the world. .. . To the lay reader this 
absolute Idealism doubtless seems insubstantial and unreal 
enough. But it is astonishing to learn how many paths lead up 
to it.... Taken altogether, they end by making about as 
formidable a convergence of testimony as the history of opinion 
affords.” | 

One difficulty which the absolute as all-knower enabled 
James to counter was that of showing how an idea can point 

SOPs 700i. 


26 RELIGION.IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


to its object. But after nine years of bondage to this use of 
the absolute, he asserted his independence, saying that Pro- 
fessor Dickinson S. Miller had showed him that “ any definite 
experienceable workings will serve as intermediary between 
idea and object as well as the absolute mind’s intentions.” * 
Other tributes to the absolute as having value for the problem 
of knowledge are paid even in the book where the attack is most 
bitter. In Pragmatism * he calls it the ‘‘ sublimest achievement 
of intellectualist philosophy,” saying that it has supplanted the 
conception of Substance, Scholasticism’s great contribution to 
the history of thought. And in A Pluralistic Universe® he ad- 
mits that absolutists have a ‘‘ healthy faith” that the world 
must be rational and self-consistent. 

But the chief value of the absolute lies in its religious func- 
tion. Reference has already been made to the passage in the 
Principles of Psychology where James speaks of the absolute 
as a “ Great Companion.” Of similar content is a passage in 
A Pluralistic Universe where he says: ‘‘ From a pragmatic 
point of view the difference between living against a back- 
ground of foreignness and one of intimacy means the differ- 
ence between a general habit of wariness and one of trust. One 
might call it a social difference, for after all, the common socius 
of us all is the great universe whose children we are.” * Ab- 
solutism may thus respond to what is the deepest religious 
need, for as James remarks elsewhere, ‘‘ the chief call forme 
God on modern men’s part is for a being who will inwardly 
recognize them and judge them sympathetically.”° __ 

Working on the supposition that the intimacy which ab- 
solute pantheism brings must be retained in any satisfactory 
religious scheme, James in A Pluralistic Universe develops his 
famous conception of a ‘‘ confluent consciousness ” which has 
many points in common with the absolute. “‘ May not we 
ourselves form the margin of some more really central self 
in things which is co-conscious with the whole of us?” James 
asks. ‘‘ May not you and I be confluent in a higher conscious- 


* Cf. The Meaning of Truth, p. 22. BO Poa: TP, tar: 
Pb. 145. 8 The Meaning of Truth, p. 189n. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 27, 


ness, and confluently active there, though we know it not? ” ® 
This great central consciousness seems to be similar to if not 
identical with the world-consciousness or cosmic conscious~ 
ness to which James often alludes elsewhere. In an article 
written in reply to W. C. Gore’s criticism of Schiller, James 
himself suggests the resemblance of the world-consciousness to 
an absolute. “The absolute,” he says, “is surely one of the 
great hypotheses of philosophy; it must be thoroughly dis- 
cussed. Its advocates have usually treated it only as a logical 
necessity; and very bad logic, as it seems to me, have they in- 
variably used. It is high time that the hypothesis of a world- 
consciousness should be discussed seriously.” And he goes on 
to say that “So far, Fechner is the only thinker who has 
done any elaborate work of this kind on the world-soul ques- 
tion.” *° Similarly, in his discussion of a great ‘‘ mother-sea ” 
or “‘ fountain-head ” of consciousness in the Ingersoll Lecture 
on Human Immortality, James comes remarkably near to 
professing himself an absolutist. Indeed the chief criticism 
made of the lecture, as James shows in the preface to the 
second edition, was that it defended a form of absolute panthe- 
ism. And the lecture does give some ground for the criticism. 
For example, discussing the advantages or disadvantages of 
individual immortality as compared with a merging of all in- 
dividuals in a great “cosmic reservoir”? of memories, James 
observes: ‘ If all determination is negation, as the philosophers 
say, it might well prove that the loss of some of the particular 
determinations which the brain imposes would not appear a 
matter for such absolute regret.” ** And in a note he feels 
constrained to add that “it is not necessary to identify the 
consciousness postulated in the lecture, as pre-existing behind 
the scenes, with the Absolute Mind of transcendental Ideal- 
ism, although, indeed, the notion of it might lead in that direc- 
tion”’*” and apparently did so lead in the minds of many of 
his hearers and readers. There are indications, as well, that 
the absolutistic aspects of the conception were not absent from 


aor. 200: 11 P, 30, 
10 Journal of Philosophy, etc., 1906, 3: 657. 12 Pp, 58. 


28 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


his own mind. Speaking of the possibility of revelation he 
says: ‘‘Gleams, however finite and unsatisfying,’ [because 
they come through human media] “ of the absolute life of the 
universe, are from time to time vouchsafed.” ** The figure 
and the phrasing here both suggest the attitude of the wor- 
shipper. | 

But it is not necessary to point to a possible community of 
consciousness in order to suggest that a peculiar religious in- 
timacy exists between us and the absolute. The monistic ideal 
itself makes its own appeal and suggests its worshipfulness. 
Beside it pluralism is a “turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an 
affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial no- 
bility.” ** Monism is much more “illustrious,” it has a kind 
of ‘majesty ” and “nobility.” ‘ A certain emotional response 
to the character of oneness ” might almost be called “a part 
of philosophic common sense,” *’ or more accurately, of phil- 
osophic mysticism, for “‘ we may fairly suppose that the auth- 
ority which absolute monism undoubtedly possesses, and prob- 
ably always will possess over some persons, draws its strength 
far less from intellectual than from mystical grounds.” “ To 
interpret absolute monism worthily, be a mystic.” *® Else- 
where James speaks of this mystic attitude as though its ac- 
complishments were wholly commendable. ‘‘ This overcoming 
of all the usual barriers between the individual and the ab- 
solute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we 
both become one with the absolute and we become aware of 
our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical 
tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.” 
And the mystic tradition is a catholic tradition. To some de- 
gree we all share it. ‘‘ We all have some ear for this monistic 
music: it elevates and reassures. We all have at least the germ 
of mysticism in us.” *® 

But while we all respond to this mystical appeal of the ab- 
solute, the “sick soul” is especially susceptible to it. James 

13 P. 16. 16 Pragmatism, p. 151. 


14 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 45. 17 Varieties, p. 4109. 
15 Pragmatism, p. 131. 18 Pragmatism, p. 154. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 29 


as one who at times was himself a “ sick soul” knew whereof 
he wrote. “This forms one permanent inferiority of plural- 
ism,” he says, ‘‘ from the pragmatic point of view. It has no 
saving message for incurably sick souls. Absolutism, among 
its other messages, has that message, and is the only scheme 
that has it necessarily. That constitutes its chief superiority, 
and is the source of its religious power.” *® And we can all 
sympathize with the “sick soul,” James thinks, for ‘“ There 
are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick 
of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, 
and we fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust 
the chances of things. We want a universe where we can just 
give up, fall on our father’s neck, and be absorbed into the 
absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or sea.” 
Then “ religious monism comes with its consoling words: ‘ All 
is needed and essential — even you with your sick soul and 
heart. All are one with God, and with God all is well. The 
everlasting arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite 
appearance you seem to fail or to succeed.’”*° And while 
it meets the needs of the sick soul especially capably, the ab- 
solute can render a service to the healthy-minded as well, 
chiefly in the way of preventing him from getting sick. It gives 
him a moral holiday, ** and enables him to put into practice 
the gospel of relaxation. This suggested function of the abso- 
lute did not, however, meet with the favor of its defenders, so 
in the preface to The Meaning of Truth James jocosely took it 
back, saying: “‘ The absolute is true in mo way then, and least 
of all, by the verdict of the critics, in the way which I as- 
signed.” 

But whether its gifts of moral holidays be accepted or not, 
history shows that the absolute has functioned, and func- 
tioned religiously. ‘‘ The use of the absolute is proved by the 
whole course of men’s religious history. The eternal arms are 
then beneath.” *? Not satisfied with the imposing dignity of 
its position as an object apart, possessed of majesty, nobility, 


19 The Meaning of Truth, p. 228. 21 Pragmatism, p. 74. 
20 Pragmatism, pp. 292-3. 22 Pragmatism, p. 273. 


30 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


and aesthetic charm, the absolute has reached down to men 
in their mystical moods and responded to their appeals for 
aid. It has given security and peace; it has offered encour- 
agement to the failure, companionship to the lonely, comfort 
to the sick, and to the healthy-minded it has given the chance 
of a moral holiday. “‘ As a good pragmatist,” says James, “I 
myself ought to call the absolute true ‘in so far forth,’ then,” 
(as it satisfies these human demands) “and I unhesitatingly 
now do so.” * 

But unfortunately, to declare the absolute true “so far 
forth ” leaves room for declaring it untrue so far and further. 
The absolute meets some demands, but it violates others. 
These we must now consider. In the first place, it is ‘‘ noble ” 
in a bad, as well as in a good sense. James says: “ In this 
real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view 
of things is ‘noble,’ that ought to count as a presumption 
against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The 
prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, 
but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he surely can be 
no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of 
our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in 
the empyrean.”’ ** 

The absolute is a “dapper ” conception. It has a “ formal 
grandeur,” but only formal, as it “‘ furnishes a pallid outline for 
the real world’s richness.” It is ‘“‘ remote ” and it is “ sterile.” 
This sterility is for both knowledge and religion, since ‘“ the ab- 
solute is useless for deductive purposes. It gives us absolute 
safety, if you will, but it is compatible with every relative 
danger. ... It is an hypothesis that functions retrospec- 
tively only not prospectively.”’ And, ‘‘ apart from the cold com- 
fort of assuring us that with it all is well . . . it yields us no 
relief whatever.” *° 

And this is not all. The absolute is not only useless, it is 
absurd. Idealists represent the absolute as the all-knower. 


23 Pragmatism, p. 73. 
24 Pragmatism, p. 72. 
25 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 126 ff. cf. Pragmatism, pp. 70-71. 


OF WILLIAM AMES 31 


But “ thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame an 
almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to 
the enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would 
then seem obliged to carry.” The absolute must know what 
everything is not. This at once suggests an overpowering bur- 
den of “‘ explicitly negative ” information. And if there be silly 
ideas, the absolute must carry them to establish their silliness. 
“One would expect it fairly to burst with such an obesity, 
plethora, and superfoetation of useless information.” ”° 

From the ridiculousness of the absolute we pass naturally 
to its inner inconsistency. And this, for reasons that will ap- 
pear, requires a somewhat detailed examination. 

James begins his attack on the absolute in A Pluralistic 
Universe ** by showing how difficult it is, logically, to conceive 
many different minds as forming in themselves one inclu- 
sive mind. The difficulty is paralleled by the problem psy- 
chology has confronted of showing how many mental elements, 
ideas or sensations, can themselves constitute one knower, one 
conscious process. The old atomistic psychology of the sensa- 
tionist school called the knower the sum of the elements. The 
knowing process was the psychical elements feeling them- 
selves.** Rationalists, not content with this, have invoked the 
aid of a unifying principle, whose function is to relate and 
whose agent is the Ego, or self. James’s own position in the 
Principles involved, he tells us, the rejection alike of the hy- 
pothesis that the elements had no unifying agency, and of the 
counter-hypothesis that this agency was the self. The unifying 
element was there, he held, as a part of the process, but as a dis- 
tinct yet immanent entity. The knower consisted of the ele- 
ments plus something formal and unifying. The twenty-six let- 
ters of the alphabet taken together form a twenty-seventh thing. 
So, although James would not admit the presence of a soul, or 
self, he did claim that a new element was present. The ele- 
ments unified are the same as the elements separate only in an 


26 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 127-8. 

27 Chapter V. 

28 Cf. James’s article ‘‘On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology.” 
Mind, 1884, p. 7. 


32 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


objective way. They do know the same thing. But aside from 
this kind of sameness they are different; a new entity is there. 
Yet the new element is nothing “ transcendental,” nothing 
which like a deus ex machina has come in from outside to per- 
form unifying process. The unity, when it is there at all, is 
there as the form of the psychosis, feeling, or state of mind 
itself. A thought of the alphabet is not a manifold of twenty- 
six coexisting elements. It is a unity just as every pulse of 
consciousness is a unity. A mental state whose object is com- 
plex is not composed of simple mental states. It merely fol- 
lows the simpler states and supersedes them in function.” 

Now the absolute presents a similar problem. According to 
the theories of its proponents, the absolute is the sum of our 
finite selves. It is the whole and we are the parts; it is the 
sentence and we the words; or it is the word while we are the 
letters. But by the aid of this, the transcendentalists’ own 
metaphor, we at once see difficulties in the conception of the 
absolute. First, why is the absolute’s experience of us, in one 
grand Whole, so different from our own experience of ourselves 
as divided, limited, imperfect, and so full of pain and sin? 
Second, how can we, ideas in the mind of the Knower, become 
so active on our own account like characters in search of an 
author? Third, in the physical world there really are no 
wholes, but only parts; there is and can be no compounding. 
In the mental world there are real wholes, the meaning of 
the sentence is as real as the meaning of each word, but the 
whole is more than the sum of its parts. A new element has 
entered. We confront, then, the following dilemma. Accept- 
ing, as absolutists do, the idealistic theory that reality is men- 
tal, that what is real is what is experienced, we must either 
agree that pain and evil and division are real, since we ex- 
perience them, and in this case we deny the absolutistic notion 
that reality is perfect; or we must admit a distinct agent to do 
the work of the all-knower, in which case, says James with an 
almost audible chuckle, we no longer have a monism. It will 


29 Cf. Principles of Psychology, 1: 278, et passim, and cf. also the modifica- 
tion of this view recorded in Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 397 ff. 


OF WILLIAM {AMES 33 


not help to claim that the experiences are one thing qud finite 
and another gud infinite. A world which is open to such a 
dualistic interpretation is itself a dualism. The whole difficulty 
arises over the question as to how any collective experience can 
ever be logically identical with a lot of distributive experiences. 
Can we logically accept a belief in a knower, finite or infinite, 
unless we are willing to admit that he must be a distinct unify- 
ing agent? James confesses to an unwillingness to bring in 
any transcendental agency in either case. The individual soul 
has served its purpose, and until some pragmatic justification 
for it is found, it must be relegated to the limbo of obsolete 
hypotheses. And as for the absolute soul —well, a theistic 
God would seem a more natural object of belief than an ab- 
solute who couldn’t be absolute since he must be one member 
of a dualism. 

The absolute is thus impossible logically. But the problem 
was not allowed to rest there. Apparently the mystic or prag- 
matic appeal of the absolute was sufficiently strong to keep 
James’s mind working on the problem. Reading Hegel, and 
disliking Hegel’s account of the matter, he was yet attracted 
by Hegel’s idea that the absolute, having no environment, has 
“attained to being its own other ” and transcended the logic 
of identity. If this be true of the absolute, why not of finite 
experience, James seems to have reasoned, and he challenged 
Hegel’s denial that this transcending of its own identity was 
achievable by any finite entity. 

He received aid, in his rdle of challenger, from the works 
of Henri Bergson. With Bergson’s aid, he tells us (probably 
over-modestly, since one of James’s important articles in Mind 
for 1884 is cited by Bergson himself in 1889 — Time and Free 
Will, p. 29) James came to see that the conceptual treatment 
of the flow of reality had a practical rather than a speculative 
value. Concepts are discrete and disparate, cutting reality up 
into small bits which bear but little resemblance to the original 
flux, and valuable only because they afford a basis for a re- 
turn to the sensible flow of experience. In this stream of feel- 
ing consciousness, if anywhere, reality is to be found. And in 


34 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


this flux of reality, we see clearly, the logic of identity cannot 
apply. Reality overflows our logic. All the Zenos in the world 
cannot keep Achilles from catching the tortoise. Here any 
moment of experience is “its own other.” The pulses of con- 
sciousness interpenetrate. “‘ The rush of our thought forward 
through its fringes is the everlasting peculiarity of its life.” 

Here then is the solution of our problem as to how the many 
can be one. Every smallest pulse of experience is a manifold 
which is at the same time a unity. The absolute may, as Hegel 
says, take its other up into itself. But this is just what hap- 
pens when every individual morsel of the sensational stream 
takes up its adjacent morsels by coalescing with them. “ Here 
inside the minimal pulses of experience is realized that very 
inner complexity which the transcendentalists say only the 
absolute can genuinely possess. . . . Something ever goes in- 
dissolubly with something else.” °° So we can no longer have 
any objection to the hypothesis that states of consciousness 
can be compounded. Every smallest state of consciousness 
overflows its own definition. And since in the Principles James 
had advocated the theory that the self was nothing but suc- 
cessive states he now passed easily from the admission that 
these states are capable of compounding themselves to the 
admission that finite selves are also capable of such com- 
pounding.** ; 

The reason for this lengthy digression to examine James’s 
analysis of the logic of the absolute will now become apparent 
when we observe that while James seems to have cleared away 
his difficulties as to the logic of the situation, he does not come 
forward with a glad espousal of the absolute. Instead he 
brings out a conception wholly as fantastic and much more 
unusual, Fechner’s theory of an over-soul. Why does he choose 
this rather than the absolute? 

Professor Arthur O. Lovejoy writing in the International 
Journal of Ethics for January 1911 makes James’s motive for 


80 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 284. 
31 An admission in which Royce, for one, took great delight. Cf., e.g., 
The Problem of Christianity, vol. 2, pp. 31 ff. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES a5 


refusing to accept the claims of idealistic monism wholly logi- 
cal. James’s philosophy, he maintains, was not arbitrarily put 
together to include all the propositions it would be congenial 
to believe. ‘ Unlike the English Hegelians, religiously inclined, 
who try to eat their cake and have it too”? James showed a 
“logical scrupulosity ” which forbade his fashioning a theory 
of being to justify all his religious demands. James indeed 
claims to be “‘ resentful because my absolutist friends seemed 
to me to be stealing the privilege of blowing both hot and 
cold. To establish their absolute they used an intellectualist 
type of logic which they disregarded when employed against 
it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to have mentioned 
the objections that had stopped me so completely. I had 
yielded to them against my ‘ will to believe’ out of pure logi- 
cal scrupulosity.” *? 

But need this logical scrupulosity have deterred James any 
longer after the elaborate argument we have just considered 
had broken down all logical barriers? James makes a definite 
break with logic, he tells us, having been shown by Bergson 
that logic is unable to cope with reality as it is found in the 
continuum of the sensible flux. Turning from concepts to per- 
cepts James solves the problem which had stood between him 
and the absolute. Many consciousnesses can compound them- 
selves to form one consciousness. Whether, then, we say that 
he has solved his problem logically or that he has cast logic to 
the four winds, is it possible longer to maintain that it is 
“logical scrupulosity ”? which keeps him from becoming a 
loyal absolutist? 

But if not logic, what did keep him? Our answer is: A sense 
for religious values both mystically and pragmatically ap- 
praised. Logic entered the situation at all only as pragmatic 
logic. The absolute simply did not satisfy demands which 
James could not ignore. And these were not primarily the de- 
mands of logical consistency. We have seen that James was 
susceptible to the charms of the absolute. He was at times 
a ‘‘ sick soul.” He felt keenly the need for security. He never 

82 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 197. 


36 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


tires of repeating the statement that the need for a realm in 
which our ideals are eventually brought to fruition is one of 
the deepest needs of the human breast.** And in his healthy- 
minded periods he knew the value of a moral holiday. But 
with all its virtues, certain qualities of the absolute could not 
be forgiven or ignored. It was more “ intimate ” than theism’s 
“‘ exalted monarch,” yet not intimate enough. It was noble, yet 
that very nobility,was a disqualification. The God of heaven 
and earth could not be a gentleman. God is the only being who 
cannot be remote. 

The problem of evil, that ancient stumbling-block, was for 
James with his human sympathies and interests much too real 
and too pressing to be passed over lightly. It was not a prob- 
lem susceptible of a so-called “ logical” solution, such as call- 
ing it the “ privation of good,” the dark side of the picture, or 
the antithesis of the synthesis. As James himself observed, 
where the problem of evil for absolutism is the speculative one 
of how evil arose, for pragmatism it is the practical one of how 
to get rid of it. 

James does, it is true, refer in the Varieties ** to the specula- 
tive difficulty of finding the origin of evil in a God who is 
wholly good. And in a certain very limited sense it may be 
said to be the logic of the situation which drives him to postu- 
late a finite God. But surely the logical sense is most limited. 
The problem was logical only as every problem can be ex- 
pressed in logical terms. The issues as they presented them- 
selves in James’s mind were living issues first and logically 
arranged afterward. His interest, emphatically, was not in de- 
ciding how evil can come from good. Rather was it the 
“‘ melioristic ” interest in what can be done about it. In so far as 
the question of origin presented itself at all it was in the 
reaction: how fearful is the evil of this world and how intoler- 
able is any Deity who does not get rid of it when he has the 
power to do so! As he expresses it in Pragmatism, ‘“‘ The scale 
of evil defies all human tolerance, and transcendental idealism 
in Bradley or Royce carries us no further than the book of 

q 83 Cf. The Will to Believe, etc., p. 83; Pragmatism, p. 106. %4 P. 131. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 37 


Job. . . . A God who can relish such superfluities of horror is 
no God for human beings to appeal to.” °° Here again we see 
that the insight of the “sick soul” is not to be denied. Its 
craving for a final satisfactory solution is at variance with its 
own vision of the ultimate and irremediable horror of much in 
life. Our civilization zs “‘ founded on the shambles.” Evil has 
a final quality about it which we may yearn to see transcended. 
But the facts of this life do not show such transcendence. No 
eternal ideal order can atone for the agony of suffering ex- 
perienced here and now. 

The only way out is but incompletely satisfactory. Some of 
this misery can be alleviated. Some comfort is attainable 
through active energetic effort. So the solution, in so far as 
there is one, is practical. The absolute, with its aloofness from 
practical affairs here shows its impotence, its ineptitude for 
human service. As James observes, the absolute is beautiful 
aesthetically, intellectually, and morally (in so far as the desire 
for security is moral). But practically it is less beautiful. And 
the practical deficiency counterbalances the virtues. It is 
“from a human point of view” that its faults are most ap- 
parent. 

So it was partly from “ human ” and “ practical ” considera- 
tions that James finally turned from the absolute. The indif- 
ference of the absolute to the problem of evil and human suf- 
fering and to the problem of freedom and human achievement 
furnished James with a pragmatic motive for rejecting it. The 
absolute satisfied some pragmatic demands but it failed to 
satisfy others which were more important. It simply was not 
verified in the actual experience of human living. As a postu- 
late it did not have sufficient value, it did not work. 

It was also partly from considerations of religious intimacy. 
As James shows in A Pluralistic Universe ** absolutism fur- 
nishes a greater degree of intimacy with the Deity than does 
dualistic theism, but pluralism’s intimacy is still more 
close. And religion with its experience of salvation, its testi- 
mony that real, not merely apparent, evil has been transformed 

ase Pers s. 86 Esp. Chap. VIII, 


38 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


¢ ) 


into good through its ‘‘ saving experiences” is witness to the 
working of a Power that cannot be absolute, or the evil would 
not have existed in the first place, but that is all the more god- 
like and worshipful because of the community of its interests 
and purposes with those of humankind. Religious experience, 
mysticism itself, take on meaning and significance if the re- 
ligious Object be not an absolute but one to whom our human 
problems will be real. 

Confirmation is brought to our contention that the way was 
logically open for James to accept the absolute in the fact 
that he himself calls it a possible hypothesis which must be 
taken into account, but as a hypothesis only. It is not a pre- 
supposition of our thinking. On this James insists most strenu- 
ously. It is not a necessary implication such that a person 
makes himself illogical or ridiculous by denying it. This dog- 
matic assertion of the absolute’s necessity always aroused 
James’s ire. Absolutism is a hypothesis, but not a presupposi- 
tion. And anti-absolutism is another hypothesis equally worthy 
of a hearing. Reality may be one, but then again it may be 
of the “strung-along variety.’”? And we observe at once that 
to admit other hypotheses as equally worthy of consideration is 
to take a position with which the strict absolutist can have 
little sympathy. The fact that James required any entity, even 
the absolute, to give a pragmatic account of itself shows at 
what a far remove from thorough-going absolutism was his 
personal position, and is further evidence that James enter- 
tained the notion of the absolute at all only because he was 
attracted by its religious value. 

Even when the logical barriers were down, then, and when 
the absolute was admissible as a hypothesis, James refused to 
adopt it as his own. But although the rejection of the absolute 
per se is definite, we find up till the end concessions to the 
kind of religious Object of which the absolute was the most 
extreme example. We may set down these concessions in order. 
First, as noted, James admitted the absolute as a hypothesis. 
The absolute is not only true “so far forth” but it is avail- 
able for certain uses. We may resort to it when we have 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 39 


occasion to. For example, it may be taken abstractly or con- 
cretely. “ Abstractly, like the word ‘ winter,’ as a memoran- 
dum of past experience that orients us toward the future, the 
notion of the absolute world is indispensable.” The amnti- 
absolutistic relativity of James’s position comes out yet more 
clearly when we read that the absolute may be accepted by 
some and not by others: “ Concretely it is also indispensable 
to some minds, for it determines them religiously, being often 
a thing to change their lives by.” *” And James gives some 
support for the extreme view that we may accept the absolute 
when it works and reject it when it does not, as the mood 
changes. 

Second, we may note that of all the hypothetical absolutes 
he encountered, James found that of Royce the least un- 
congenial. Ever and again we find partial exception made for 
Royce in the midst of James’s anti-absolutistic tirades. The 
reason seems to be not so much James’s respect for the in- 
genuity of Royce’s reasoning, though this is mentioned, as 
the almost pragmatic character of Royce’s absolute. The ideas 
of which it was composed were defined in terms of purpose 
and a valiant effort was made to keep the absolute itself from 
indifference to human good and evil.** 

Third, James suggests more than once that the absolute 
would be much more acceptable if it could only be transformed 
into an Ultimate. ‘‘The two notions would have the same 
content — the maximally unified content of fact, namely — 
but their time-relations would be positively reversed.” °° We 
are interested, that is, not so much in the rational unity of 
things as in “their possible empirical unification.” This con- 
ception of the absolute as an “ ultimate ” suggests at once the 
pragmatic conception of truth as a goal that we approach 
rather than a relation that underlies our thinking. Truth is a 
process of verification. “‘ Truth happens to an idea. It becomes 


87 Pragmatism, pp. 266-7. 

38 Cf. Royce’s treatments of the problem of evil in The Spirit of Modern 
Philosophy, Studies of Good and Evil and in fact all through his work. 

39 Pragmatism, p. 159, cf. ibid. pp. 165, 280 ff., also The Meaning of 
Truth, pp. 266-7. 


40 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


true, is made true by events.” *° Just as truth is what we work 
toward, a terminus, not a starting point, so the absolute has its 
desirable aspects if conceived as the ideal goal of our effort, 
the final synthesis which we ourselves help to establish. James 
refers us in this connection to Schiller’s essay on “‘ Activity and 
Substance ” where reality is postulated as the summation rather 
than the substratum of experience. “To find true being we 
must look upwards to the Ideal, not downwards to the unknow- 
able. Our true self is not what underlies thought, will, and 
feeling, but what combines them in a perfect harmony; Reality 
is not what transcends experience but what perfects it.” ** 

Fourth, James did save the absolute’s religious qualities. 
We cannot overemphasize the fact that to give up the absolute 
was not to give up the hope of satisfying his religious aspira- 
tions. James denied the absolute to affirm God. The absolute, 
as he often insists, is not the God of the prophets. “‘ The abso- 
lute has nothing but its superhumanness in common with the 
theistic God.” ** The God to whom James did give his al- 
legiance, as we shall see in another connection, was a God who 
could make a difference in the details of human living, for 
whom the particular facts of experience were matters of real 
concern, and who was able to grant to his worshippers mysti- 
cal experiences of a “saving ” nature. 

James’s final word on the absolute, then, was one of rejec- 
tion, based chiefly on moral and religious grounds. Professor 
Hocking has said that “‘ In Pragmatism and later works James 
became more or less tolerant of the Absolute,” ** but our evi- 
dence suggests that toward the end James’s tolerance grew 
less instead of greater. At least it is true that only toward the 
end did he carry through a sustained argument whose object 
was the absolute’s downfall. He seems to have been willing 
finally to do away with it because he had found such an ade- 
quate substitute. Fechner’s over-soul, author of mystical ex- 
periences, plausible explanation of the way in which conscious- 

40 Pragmatism, p. 201. 41 Humanism, p. 225. 


42 Pragmatism, p. 299; cf. A Pluralistic Universe, p. 134, Varieties, p. 522. 
48 The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 184n. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 41 


nesses can be compounded and the larger relations directly ex- 
perienced, and truly intimate object of religious devotion, ap- 
pealed to James both pragmatically and religiously. And it 
could only so appeal because it was in harmony with the phil- 
osophical belief a radical empiricist was compelled to hold, the 
belief in pluralism, which must now engage our attention. 


Til 
THE PLURALISMS 


THINK it would have depressed him,” wrote Professor 

Santayana of James, “if he had had to confess that any 

important question was finally settled. He would still have 
hoped that something might turn up on the other side, and 
that just as the scientific hangman was about to dispatch the 
poor convicted prisoner, an unexpected witness would ride up 
in hot haste, and prove him innocent.” * But this conflict be- 
tween the absolute and pluralism was full of issues which were 
too vital to permit a prolonged suspension of judgment. Prag- 
matism is introduced in the book by the same name as 
a method for settling just such metaphysical disputes, and 
James could not be expected to refrain from applying it to 
what was for him the most suggestive of all dilemmas. Bring- 
ing the pragmatic method and temper to bear on the problem, 
James finds that “with her criterion of the practical differ- 
ences that theories make,” pragmatism must ‘‘ equally abjure 
absolute monism and absolute pluralism. The world is One 
just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connec- 
tion. It is many just so far as any definite connection fails 
to obtain.” ” 

This may be all very well speculatively, but does it settle 
our religious problem? Can we afford to wait until all the 
evidence is in before daring to give expression to religious 
feeling? Clearly we cannot, and James, author of The Will to 
Believe and champion of the view that faith may be necessary 
where assurance is impossible, knows that we cannot. So a 

1 Character and Opinion in the United States, p. 82. 
2 Pragmatism, p. 156. 
42 


OF WILLIAM {AMES 43 


more definite conclusion is reached a few pages further on, 
where James finds that ‘‘ Pragmatism, pending the final em- 
pirical ascertainment of just what the balance of union and 
disunion among things may be, must obviously range herself 
on the pluralistic side. . . . [The] hypothesis of a world im- 
perfectly unified still . . . must be sincerely entertained.” * 
That is, pragmatism inclines to meliorism, a form of religious ; 
pluralism which insists that there is no assurance at present of / 
the final salvation of the things that man holds dear, but that! 
these things will be saved if at all by the joint effort of man and 
God in the quest for value. 

James reaches a similar position in A Pluralistic Universe. 
The alternative is there drawn definitely between the “ block 
universe ” and the world composed of parts related in some 
ways and unrelated in others. These two ‘“ make pragmatically 
different ethical appeals.” * We may choose either as we please, 
but the possibility of choosing either must be admitted. “ Real- 
ity may exist distributively, just as it sensibly seems to, after 
all. On that possibility I do insist.” 

And for himself and his own view of life James insists on 
more than this possibility. The prodigal son attitude of mon- 
ism is not the last word in philosophy, though it has its own 
pragmatic value and makes its own appeal. In the last analy- 
sis religion does not call us, as losers in the game of life, to 
weep on our Father’s shoulder. Its message is much more 
adequately expressed in the words heard by Ezekiel: ‘‘ Son of 
man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee.” Life 
is real and life is earnest, its dangers and losses are real, as 
the “sick soul ” knows only too well; but so are its victories 
and achievements. 

So James is a pluralist. But what does this mean? Pluralism 
has stood for many different things in the history of philosophy. 
Atomism has been called pluralistic, and so has monadism. 
Yet James’s philosophy does not read like that of either Democ- 
ritus or Leibnitz. With Lotze James has more in common, 
particularly with Lotze’s idea that reality is incomplete. With 


3 Pragmatism, p. 161. 4 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 327. 


44 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


Wundt’s teleology and voluntarism there is also some affinity. 
A less well known pluralist writer for whose views James pro- 
fessed sympathy is Lutoslawski. This author’s theory of a 
world of independent eternal spirits can be found in several 
works.” Less individualistic, or, as the critics of pluralism 
would say, less anarchical is the theory of James Ward, whose 
pluralism shows its conservative nature in the fact that it finds 
in theism its unified completion. Howison’s The Limits of Evo- 
lution is an attempt to steer between what the author believed 
was Royce’s monistic failure to allow for individual freedom 
and responsibility on the one hand, and what he considered 
James’s irrational chaos on the other. Dr. Hastings Rashdall 
in his essay on ‘“‘ Personality: Human and Divine ” also pleads, 
in pluralistic fashion, for a system which shall insure each per- 
son’s independence of his fellows, though not of God. Professor 
McTaggart’s pluralistic illustration is that of a “ College” 
which suggests a community of selves contained within an 
absolute self. 

Of that group of thinkers in whose theories of pluralism 
James found a more direct confirmation of his own views, most 
prominent is Professor F. C. S. Schiller, whose “ humanism ” 
seemed to James to be pluralism of the right sort. Bergson’s 
ability to discover the constant working of a creative principle 
by which circumstances apparently played-out and sterile were 
made to yield an element wholly new James also welcomed 
as supporting his own pluralistic view of the fact of novelty. 
At times James refers to the individualism of Thomas David- 
son, and quotes apparently with favor Davidson’s view of the 
universe as ‘‘a republic of immortal spirits.” C. S. Peirce, who 
influenced James along pragmatic lines, may also be called a 
pluralist in his stress on the importance of the particular in 
logical theory. B. P. Blood, whom James discovered and 
brought before the public eye, claimed to be both a pluralist 
and a mystic. Yet a study of his posthumously published Plurt- 
verse Suggests that his chief contribution to the philosophy of 


5 Cf. esp. Uber die Grundvoraussetzung und Consequenzen der individual- 
ischen Weltanschauung, p. 79. 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 45 


pluralism lies in the attention he has called to the operation in 
the cosmos of a law which runs counter to the law of gravita- 
tion. If gravitation, the monistic principle which draws all 
things unto itself, were not counteracted, stars and planets 
would soon fuse in a conglomerate central mass. A pluralistic, 
divisive principle must be invoked to explain the fact that this 
does not occur. James seems to have been greatly attracted 
by Blood’s unique and picturesque literary style. ‘ Ever not 
quite ” is a phrase of Blood’s which James often quoted as 
expressive of the pluralistic position. But much more thor- 
ough-going was the influence of Gustav Fechner, whose pan- 
psychism hinted at a solution of the psychological problems 
of mysticism, and whose attention to empirical detail suggested 
a pluralistic point of view. James often refers with approval 
to Fechner’s theory of a hierarchy of selves which are inde- 
pendent yet members of one great cosmic consciousness. 
The most important pluralistic influence on James, however, 
was undoubtedly that of Renouvier. This writer’s pluralism 
may be called physical, metaphysical, and religious. So per- 
vasive is it that one feels it can only be the product of a strong 
anti-monistic feeling. ‘‘Le monisme a pour invariable com- 
pagnon le determinisme,” Renouvier tells us, and with a cer- 
tain pluralistic vigor: ‘‘ Ma conscience préfere cet individu 
misérable 4 toute la fantasmagorie des monismes.” ° The havoc 
that monism has wrought in the history of religion is graphi- 
cally described in the Psychologie rationnelle.' Absolutism is 
an unworthy philosophy. The absolutistic habit of mind has 
led to intolerance and fanaticism. Freedom must be real and 
novelty must be also. There are many consciousnesses, not one 
all-embracing consciousness. And in the Principes de la Na- 
ture Renouvier explains that the physical world is made up 
of atoms and monads. But this means that, if we are not to 
be confronted with an infinity which is inconceivable and in- 
consistent, we must look on the world as made up of a limited 
number of separate units. Applied to the temporal sequence 


6 Cf. Esquisse d’une Classification systématique, 2: 241. 
‘In Essais de Critique générale, Deuxiéme Essai, 1875, 3: 253. 


46 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


this suggests that instead of an infinite regress we must postu- 
late a beginning in time. And if a beginning occurred once it 
can occur again, which means that novelty and freedom are 
not only demanded but entirely possible. And this in turn 
leaves room, as James explains, for “ absolute novelties, un- 
meditated beginnings, gifts, chance, freedom, and acts of 
faith 
This reference to writers who in one sense or another may 
be called pluralistic should be sufficient to suggest that the 
philosophy of diversity has itself been diversely interpreted. 
Pluralism has been defined by Professor John Dewey in Bald- 
win’s Dictionary of Philosophy as “ the metaphysical doctrine 
that all existence is ultimately reducible to a multiplicity of 
distinct and independent beings or elements.” But as Professor 
F. J. E. Woodbridge shows, in his article in Hastings’ Encyclo- 
paedia of Religion and Ethics, pluralism in the past has been 
at times of the materialistic variety and at other times spirit- 
ualistic, while the newer pluralistic theories are better described 
as a philosophical tendency than as a definitely formulated 
system. In The Persistent Problems of Philosophy by Profes- 
sor Mary W. Calkins we find a distinction made between 
numerical pluralism and the pluralism which is qualitative. 
Numerical pluralism regards the world as composed of many 
separate parts of the same kind. Qualitative pluralism denies 
the sameness of kind and asserts the existence of a distinction 
such as that between mind and matter. James was clearly a 
numerical pluralist. Yet his radical empiricism, the theory that 
“pure experience ” is the only reality, would seem to make 
him qualitatively a monist. But right here the danger of over- 
classification, against which James warned so often and so 
vigorously, is apparent. James was a monist in his radical 
empiricism, but this statement should be followed immediately 
by the remark that very few have seen as clearly as he the 
distinctions between kinds of things and kinds of activities. 
_His monism was limited to his theory of the knowing-process. 
; What, then, was James’s pluralism? The best method for 


8 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 164. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 47 


atriving at an answer to this question seems to be first to take 
the general connotation in James’s mind of his conception of 
pluralism, then to note its more specific denotations as applied 
in differing situations, then to observe some of the corollaries 
of these specific conceptions, and finally to determine, if pos- 
sible, whether there be order of importance among these con- 
ceptions themselves. 

Taking the more general aspect first, then, we see at once 
that pluralism, if not chiefly, was in a very important way, a 
revolt against absolutism. James could not be an absolutist. 
If in order not to be one he had to be something else, then he 
was willing to be a pluralist, or almost anything. Much of the 
time this seems to be uppermost in his mind. Let us have 
done with absolutism, and let us espouse anything that will 
save us from it. James calls Paulsen a pluralist, for example, 
but, as is clear in his preface to the English translation of the 
Introduction to Philosophy, he is really referring to Paulsen’s 
anti-absolutistic method and theory. With his ready and sym- 
pathetic interest in whatever was original and significant, 
James found the intolerance of the absolute itself intolerable. 
Setting itself up as the Whole of reality the absolute is at once 
too big for us to approach it intimately in religion, and too 
small to include all in itself. Some bits must always escape. 
With all its compromise and mediations, yes, because of them, 
pluralism is a finer and worthier and more virile conception, 
and as such must hold our allegiance. 

Our contention that this general connotation of pluralism as 
an anti-absolutistic attitude loomed large in James’s mind is 
confirmed by the fact that James seems to have been little 
attracted by anything that a strict pluralism had to offer per 
se. He was indeed an individualist, but individualism seems 
to be the application of pluralism to human relations, rather 
than itself a pluralism. James was not an atomist in the sense 
of having any theory as to the physical constitution of the 
universe. Nor was he a monadist. “I see you take pluralism 
as necessarily monadistic,” he wrote to Professor Mary W. 
Calkins of Wellesley College (in an unpublished letter dated 


ae ~~~ 


ee 


48 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


May 20, 1907), ‘‘ which I don’t see as a necessity. The last 
two essays in Schiller’s Studies in Humanism are a beginning 
of pluralistic evolutionism. If you start with tychism, you can 
have relations between ‘terms vary, as well as terms, so you 
needn’t remain monadistic.” Nor did James have any interest 
in numbers for their own sake. His works give little evidence 
of any particular interest in mathematics. The Many had no 
mystical appeal for him such as the One at times actually did 
have. He was delighted to find a writer who claimed that the 
Many did exert such an attraction, but even in this case he 
had to admit that Benjamin Paul Blood’s pluralistic mysticism 
was rather a “left wing voice of defiance ” than an interest in 
the many on their own account.® 

His own system in fact requires a universe as much as it 
does a multiverse. James is no exponent of a chaos. Time and 
again he inveighs against the criticism of his position which 
describes it as denying all connection between things. This 
very criticism, he claims, is a product of the absolutistic tem- 
per. It springs from the belief that what destroys some con- 
nection destroys all connection. James’s demand is simply for 
some separation along with considerable connection. He asks 
for the “ slightest wiggle of independence,” anything to break 
up the awful and foreboding uniformity of the absolute. James 
does not even become as pluralistic as he might. In A Plural- 
istic Universe where he definitely champions pluralism he has 
much to say of a “continuum.” Reality is a flux, there is a 
stream of consciousness, we must take account of the flow of 
time. And he points with approval to Fechner and Bergson, 
yet it could easily be argued that the monistic tendencies of 
both these writers were as important as the plurdlistic. 

Let us notice further that James does not use the concep- 
tions of these men in a way which is unequivocally pluralistic. 
He drew from Fechner the conception of a great ‘‘ mother- 
sea’ or “ fountain-head ” of consciousness in which all our 
finite consciousnesses are confluent. But the use made of this 
conception in his Ingersoll lecture on Human Immortality 


9 Cf. Memories and Studies, p. 374. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 49 


actually gave rise as we have seen to the criticism that he left 
no scope for individuality. James clearly ‘“‘ abjured absolute 
pluralism,” just as pragmatism did. He had none of the belief 
in pluralism as a goal to be attained at all cost which he ac- 
cused monists of having with regard to their Absolute or their 
Unity. Pluralism has no intrinsic interest. Mystically it makes 
no appeal. Aesthetically it attracts only indirectly, as one may 
have an interest in a particular detail. Logically it presents 
itself as one among many hypotheses. 

In its general aspect, then, pluralism is both a revolt against 
absolutism, and a means to moral and religious values. What 
more specific things does it denote? A few of James’s defini- 
tions come at once to mind. Pluralism is the description of 
reality as of the “strung-along variety.” It is a theory of 
“a world imperfectly unified still.” *° It is “the belief that 
the world_is still in process of making.” It is the theory 
that “ the sundry parts of reality may be externally related.” 

These more specific definitions have many specific applica- 
tions. The first to consider is the application to the theory of 
knowledge. Pluralistic influence here may be summed up in 
the statement that knowledge is incomplete. If it were not, 
we should not now be arguing about it. The world of experi- 
ence is too indefinite in extent and too transient and growing 
in nature for the absolute or any one knower to know it all. 
But the fact that knowledge is incomplete should not dis- 
courage us. It grows, at least sometimes. And when it does, 
it grows in spots, — piecemeal, not all over. Some parts of 
knowledge are unrelated to other parts. There is no through- 
and-through relation. Relations are not constitutive, they are 
not integral to the terms related. One man’s knowledge is in- 
dependent of that of another man. And the objects of knowl- 
edge are as independent of each other as are the subjects. 
We know particular things. Concepts are nothing but means 
to more knowledge of particulars. This is what James calls 
the “ additive ” constitution of knowledge; or “ noetic plural- 


10 Pragmatism, p. I61. 
11 Meaning of Truth, p. 226. 
12 4 Pluralistic Universe, p. 321. 


a : 
Atenas 


50 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


ism,” a system of ‘concatenated knowing, going from next 
to next” which is “‘ verified every moment when we seek in- 
formation from our friends.” * 

But now, if knowledge be “additive” in this way, and if 
parts of it be relatively independent of other parts, what shall 
we say of the connections that we do find? Monism points to 
a relationship durcheinander, the meaning of each member 
implicit in the meaning of every other, each term determined 
by the sum of the relations into which it enters. For pluralism, 
however, the relations are external. The terms are not consti- 
tuted by the relations, and are not touched at all by many 
relations which exist for other terms. ‘‘ Each relation is one 
aspect, character, or function [of the term], way of its being 
taken or way of its taking something else; and . . . a bit of 
reality when actively engaged in one of these relations is not 
by that very fact engaged in all the other relations simul- 
taneously. The relations are not all what the French call 
solidaires with one another. Without losing its identity, a 
thing can either take up or drop another thing like... [a] 
log.” 14 

Relations and connections for pluralism, that is to say, are 
possible, not necessary. I may look to the right or to the left, 
and my looking is independent of the direction in which I look. 
Not being necessary, the relations are not constitutive. As 
J. S. Mill once observed, Newton is not prevented from being 
a mathematician by the fact that he is an Englishman. Rela- 
tions imply not universal co-implication, but a “‘ strung-along ” 
condition. But if relations are external, how are they known? 
it may be asked. Relations there must be, to avoid chaos. 
Absolutism may give a closed system, but at least it lets us 
know that the relations are there. How can radical empiricism 
meet this difficulty? It can, says James, by finding that rela- 
tions are as much objects of perception as are the terms re- 
lated. The relations are given in experience. It is unnecessary 
to call on monism for aid in this relating process. Pluralism 


13 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 1209. 
14 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 323. 


OF WILLIAM #AMES SI 


is thus not merely a general protest against the absolutistic 
method. It is also a specific protest against what James calls 
“vicious intellectualism,” or “‘ excluding from the fact named 
what the name’s definition fails positively to include,” a pro- 
test against and remedy for the logical dilemma in which mon- 
ism finds itself when it tries to explain how two things can 
be related.*° 

So pluralism is a theory of the nature of reality as well as 
of knowledge. Reality itself is additive. This is brought out 
clearly by the emphasis James lays on selective activity. In 
the Principles of Psychology,’® James shows that selection is 
the chief function of consciousness, just as he elsewhere shows 
that it is the chief function of sensation. The importance of 
selection is again seen in radical empiricism’s world of pure 
experience, where novelty consists in the new grouping of 
elements already given. Biologically, it is the selective activity 
of the human organism that gives meaning to life and that 
makes it possible to call human activity purposeful. Cogni- 
tively selection is a large part of the knowing process. It is 
the chief part if we think, with radical empiricism, of con- 
sciousness as merely the regrouping of elements which are 
already given. 

Now this fact of human selective activity helps to explain 
in what sense the universe may be of the growing or “ addi- 
tive’ sort. We may choose * whether we shall regard a line 
as running from east to west or from west to east —the line 
itself remains passive. In a puzzle picture we pick out the 
lines that are pertinent to our purpose. At night we observe 
the heavens and select patterns which we call constellations. 
But this is creation. This is humanly making an addition to 
data already given. It is taking the world as formless yet 
plastic and molding it to suit our purpose. As Lotze has said, 
our descriptions are themselves important additions to reality. 
We can contribute to reality and improve on it. “‘ Our philos- 


15 Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, p. 60. 
16 Chap. IX on “ The Stream of Thought.” 
17 Pragmatism, p. 252 ff. 


52 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


ophies swell the current of being, add their character to it.” * 
So just as knowledge grows in spots, reality grows not in- 
tegrally but piecemeal. Our human additions to reality sug- 
gest one of the ways in which it grows. And all the evidence 
goes to prove that each bit of reality has its own external 
environment. ‘‘ Things are with one another in various ways, 
but nothing includes everything, or dominates over every- 
thing. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. 
Something always escapes. ‘ Ever not quite.’ ” 

James sometimes tries to explain the pluralistic nature of 
reality by contrasting a ‘‘concatenated”’ with a “ consoli- 
dated ” union. The only example of true consolidation that 
we know is gravitation. This is a truly monistic principle, 
binding all matter together in an inexorable synthesis. But 
there are many examples of concatenation. You can have wire 
and copper without having a telephone system, but you can’t 
have a telephone without wire and copper. There is acquaint- 
ance without love, but there is no love without acquaintance. 
These are concatenated relations — partially inclusive, par- 
tially exclusive.” The same thing can belong to many systems 
without being “constituted” by any one of them, as when 
‘a man is connected with other objects by heat, by gravitation, 
by love, and by knowledge.” 

This should be sufficient to show that James applies his 
pluralistic conception to a wide variety of cases and finds it 
vindicated in each instance. He cites, as we shall notice else- 
where in more detail, the moral consciousness with its de- 
mand for intimacy, the additive character of knowledge, the 
selective nature of human activity, the apparent separateness 
of terms and externality of relations, and all the evidences we 
have of an imperfectly unified and growing world. He further 
appeals, for confirmation of his pluralistic view, to what he 
calls the perceptual flow of experience, and to this we must 
now attend. 


18 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 317. 
19 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 321. 
20 Cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 130. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 53 


A familiar contrast in James is that between percepts and 
concepts. Through the former we touch reality. The latter 
are inadequate in their representation of reality because they 
break it up into bits and fail to give an account of its con- 
tinuousness. Now on the surface it would appear that a con- 
tinuum which has been broken up into discrete bits has be- 
come more instead of less pluralistic, and since reality is plural 
it ought by this means to have become more real. James 
seems to have felt, however, that pluralism implied not so 
much discreteness as a growing, changing quality. A thing 
which grows must be many, even though it is a many-in-one. 

But if we follow further James’s idea of the flowing char- 
acter of reality and his attempt to fit it to his pluralistic 
scheme we discover more difficulties. Professor Lovejoy ** has 
shown that James really set forth three different and conflict- 
ing theories as to the nature of the perceptual flux of reality. 
In A Pluralistic Universe James insists on the “ coalescence ” 
and “ compenetration ” of the bits of experience. At the same 
time he describes perceptual reality as a “‘ continuum.” These 
two ideas are contradictory, Professor Lovejoy asserts, for if 
each pulse of experience completely coalesced with each other 
there could be no continuum, but ail moments of time would 
be completely fused together in an eternal timeless moment. 
We may note in passing, however, that ‘ coalescence ” and 
“compenetration ” need not mean complete merging of every 
bit of experience with every other bit. James’s argument is di- 
rected, in fact, against precisely the sort of reasoning which 
tries to include too much in a definition. It seems wholly pos- 
sible to assert that one moment blends into another without 
asserting that the blending is entire, with nothing left un- 
blended. 

However this may be, Professor Lovejoy’s further criticism 
seems entirely valid. It is that James’s assertion that reality 
is a continuum contradicts his statement that perceptual real- 
ity comes in bits. This latter view is clearly expressed in A 


ate Art. “ The Problem of Time in Recent French Philosophy,” Philosophical 
Review, 21: 538 ff, 


54 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


Pluralistic Universe and also in Some Problems of Philosophy. 
In this his last book James says, for example, “ Either your 
experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a per- 
ceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with 
reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intel- 
lectually and on reflection you can divide these into com- 
ponents, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at 
alle 22 

This it will at once be seen is much nearer a pluralistic theory 
of reality than is the theory of the ‘‘ experience-continuum ” 
which James also sets forth. A continuum can only with diffi- 
culty, accompanied by paradoxes and puzzles, be made a plural- 
ism. But a reality growing by definite increments shows its 
pluralistic affinities from the start. To our definitions of what 
pluralism meant to James we must add, then, that pluralism 
was for him a description of the way in which reality presents 
itself to perceptual experience, and so, since percepts are our 
most adequate means of knowing reality, it is a description of 
reality as it Is. 

To recapitulate, pluralism is more than a general protest 
against absolutism and a means to moral and religious value. 
It is specifically a theory of the additive nature of knowledge, 
of the disjunctive and external nature of relations, of the dis- 
creteness of parts of reality, of the finite numerical nature of 
bits of the universe. But it is yet more. Pluralism is applied 
by James, as it is by Fechner, to the realm of personal spirits. 
James was interested not merely in showing that new begin- 
nings happened in time, but in pointing out that they hap- 
pened through the agency of persons. The independence and 
creative ability of the personal individual are matters of ex- 
treme importance. In a passage in Mind for 1903 James says: 
‘Radical empiricism thus leads to the assumption of a col- 
lectivism of personal lives (which may be of any grade of 
complication, and superhuman or infrahuman as well as 
human), variously cognitive of each other, variously conative 
or impulsive, genuinely evolving and changing by effort and 


a2 Pp L545,’ cf.) Chaps.) As aL, 


OF WILLIAM }¥AMES ss 


trial, and by their interaction and cumulative achievements 
making up the world.” ** And a later passage expresses the 
same idea: ‘“‘If the ‘ melioristic’ universe were really here, 
it would require the active good-will of all of us, in the way 
of belief as well as of our other activities, to bring it to a pros- 
perous issue. The melioristic universe is conceived after a 
social analogy as a pluralism of independent powers.” ** Else- 
where he carries further the notion that the universe may be 
peopled by an order of beings other than human with whom 
we may be in close relation as respectively objects and sub- 
jects of the religious experience. The universe might conceiv- 
ably be a collection of godlike selves.*® This is unblushingly 
called a “ polytheistic ”’ view*® or “ piecemeal super-natural- 
ism.” 27 

The final application of James’s pluralism is made, then, in 
the world of spirit and personality. James believed, as did 
Fechner, in a “collectivism” of striving, cooperating beings, 
human and superhuman. This brings us at once to the most im- 
portant corollary of James’s pluralism, which was his individ- 
ualism. It was because of its conflict with the rights of the in- 
dividual that the absolute had to be discarded. James has been 
criticized for neglecting, in his book on religious experience, to 
treat institutions, forms, and observances of religion. But the 
reason for this neglect is clear and will be increasingly accept- 
able to the student of religion as the present wave of over- 
emphasis on social institutions spends itself. It was quite 
rightly the individual, not the institution, that engaged 
James’s attention, the varieties of religious experience, not 
their standardization. As James himself remarks, on the first 
page of his lecture on “Human Immortality,” too often the 
institution defeats its own ends, and stands in the way of the 
individual wants it was organized to gratify. And again, 
‘Surely the individual, the person in the singular number, is 


23 Reprinted in Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 444. 
24 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 228. 

25 Varieties, p. 525. 

26 Varieties, p. 526. 

27 Varieties, p. 523. 


56 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


the more fundamental phenomenon, and the social institution, 
of whatever grade, is but secondary and ministerial.” *° 
“There is very little difference between one man and another,” 
he quotes from his carpenter friend, ‘‘ but what there is is very 
important.”’ James shares Carlyle’s view that progress comes 
through individual rather than group activity.” And the abso- 
lute, as we have seen, is inadequate simply because ‘the 
facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take 
them in.” 

Closely related to James’s individualism is his democracy. 
‘Pluralism in philosophy,” says S. Radhakrishnan, “is the 
logical development of the spirit of democracy; for he who has 
respect for sacredness of individuality will not be inclined to 
sacrifice this uniqueness for the sake of the absolute.” *° 
James’s democracy included an interest in people of alien cul- 
ture and traditions as having “insides of their own,” and 
showed itself for example in many protests against the Ameri- 
can occupation of the Philippines. In this imaginative interest, 
both in the rights of the foreigner and in his ability to reach 
universal truth, James shows his affiliation with the Roman- 
tic movement, though it must be said that he did not share 
the Romantic flair for the picturesque and exotic in itself. His 
interest was rather in the application of the philosophic prin- 
ciple that truth is not limited to the vision of one nation or 
race. Mention should also be made of the similarity of James’s 
view to the Kantian maxim to treat “every human being as an 
end withal, and never as a means.” 

James strikes this note of sympathy for the point of view 
of the individual, wherever he may be found, time and again 
in his writings. In his lecture on immortality he reminds his 
hearers that the desires and aspirations after immortality of 
Chinese and Hottentots are as much to be respected as those 
of Bostonians. And in his “ Talks to Students on Some of 
Life’s Ideals ” he reiterates the fact that the whole of truth is 


28 Memories and Studies, p. 102. 
29 Cf. Essay on “‘ Great Men and Their Environment.” 
80 The Reign of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, p. 309. 


OF WILLIAM AMES 57 


not revealed to any one observer. Even prisons and sick rooms 
have their special revelations. In The Varieties of Religious 
Experience he stresses the fact that the mystic’s vision is 
authoritative for himself and unassailable. And in many ways 
he makes it clear that not only truth, but value as well, grows 
up inside finite experiences. The values which we know are 
those achieved by individual striving human beings. As it is 
expressed in the essay on “What Makes a Life Significant,” 
“The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing, 
—the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however 
special, with some fidelity, courage and endurance; with some 
man’s or woman’s pains.” 

Allied to James’s individualism was what might be called his 
“particularism.” Like many other pragmatists, he was a 
nominalist. Truth grows by individual knowers; and the ob- 
jects of the knowing process are as individual as its subjects. 
One of the difficulties James found with the absolute was 
that it precluded the possibility of knowing things separately. 
In our discussion of the conflict in his mind we noted that 
he makes a contrast between Hegel as an example of the 
unifying and simplifying tendency and Renouvier as “ the 
greatest living insister that simplicity shall not overwhelm 
clearness.” “ Clearness” in this context means careful atten- 
tion to detail, regard for the integrity of the parts, and unwil- 
lingness to let them be swallowed up in the whole. Professor 
Dewey has expressed a similar sentiment: ‘‘ Philosophy for- 
swears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities 
in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions 
that generate them.” ** James’s way of putting it is: “ Ac- 
quaintance with realities’ diversities is as important as under- 
standing their connection.” * “ James maintained toward each 
new fact an attitude of liberal expectancy,” says Professor 
Lovejoy in his article “‘ William James as Philosopher ” in the 
International Journal of Ethics, Volume 21. His interest was 
directed not merely toward the great uniformities and cate- 


81 Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 13. 
82 Pragmatism, p. 130. 


58 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


gories, but also toward the “unclassified residuum.’ No 
religious experience was too wild or too little amenable to 
conventional classification for him to examine and explore it. 
No “ Spinoza of the Ghetto ” or “ rustic Hegel” was too un- 
couth to attract his eager interest. 

But, as Professor Lovejoy also points out, James was not 
democratic enough to be over-tolerant. His liberal interest was 
not what Mr. William Archer has called “ color-blind neutral- 
ity.” He was too sensitive to life’s contrasts. But this aware- 
ness of diversity is again a part of the pluralistic attitude. It 
is only the monist who ignores the distinctions and sees all 
as one completely luminous moment. The pluralist admits that 
good and evil are related, but he denies that good and evil are 
to be defined merely in terms of this relationship. Monism 
takes the relation as creating the term. But pluralism insists 
that goodness gua goodness is different from goodness defined 
simply as that which overcomes evil. It is another case of the 
externality of relations, for which pluralism contends. The 
claim that the relation between good and evil is definitive is a 
most glaring example of the vicious monistic belief in through- 
and-through relationship. Pluralism with its view that things 
may be related in external fashion again vindicates itself 
morally.** 

This account of the corollaries of pluralism — individual- 
ism, democracy, particularism — serves to confirm the con- 
tention that pluralism in and for itself had little attraction 
for James and that its chief importance lay in its by-products, 
| corollaries and results. James does not expound a consistent 
and definitive idea of what pluralism is. It may mean a col- 
lectivism of personal souls, or the additive character of knowl- 
edge, or the piecemeal nature of reality, or the coalescence of 
bits of perceptual experience, or the discreteness of these same 
bits. Pluralism signifies one of these at one time and another 
at another. And here, it may be suggested, James’s procedure 
was truly pragmatic. Pluralism is interesting and important 
not so much for what it is in itself, for it is many and various 

83 Cf. Professor R. B. Perry’s Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 246. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 59 


things in itself. It is important, rather, for what it is ‘‘ known 
as’ in human experience. Its value can be reckoned in terms 
of particular experiences. Its truth or falsity ‘“ makes a dif- 
ference ” in human living. 

This leads to the question of the value of the pluralism. It 
is easy to see that just as pluralism itself cannot be limited to 
one definition, so its values are many. The first is its con- 
sistency with phenomenal appearance. The world is changing. 
**Monism doesn’t account for it.”” Pluralism is consonant with 
“this colossal universe of concrete facts, their awful bewil- 
derments, their surprises and cruelties.” *“* The world comes to 
us in pieces. ‘‘ The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot 
out of a pistol at us. Each asserts itself as a simple brute 
fact, uncalled for by the rest.” °° These parts are arbitrary, 
foreign, jolting, discontinuous. As contrasted with the great 
totality, “ prima facie there is this in favor of the eaches, that 
they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at 
least appear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet ap- 
peared immediately to only a few mystics.” °° We must re- 
member also James’s contention that the presence of the least 
jot of evil was enough to put a blemish on monism’s spotless 
appearance. As he expressed it once to his class, “‘ if at the last 
day all creation was shouting hallelujah and there remained 
one cockroach with unrequited love, that would spoil the uni- 
versal harmony.” *? 

Occasionally James talks as though its consistency with ap- 
pearance were its most important feature. “‘ The only way of 
escape from the paradoxes and perplexities of monism . . . is 
to be frankly pluralistic.” ** “‘ The absolute involves features 
of irrationality peculiar to itself.” °° But James shows that we 


84 Pragmatism, p. 22. 

35 Essay “On Some Hegelisms,” The Will to Believe and Other Essays, 
p. 264. 

86 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 129. 

87 Quoted in Santayana’s Chapter on Royce, Character and Opinion in the 
United States, p. 108. 

88 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 310. 

89 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 129. 


60 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


must not take him too seriously when he talks of deciding on 
“rational” grounds, except as we understand that “ rational ” 
in large measure means ‘ emotional.” For, ‘“ what divides us 
into possibility men or anti-possibility men is different faiths 
or postulates. . . . Talk as we will about having to yield to 
evidence, what makes us monists or pluralists, determinists 
or indeterminists, is at bottom always some sentiment like 
this.” *° James admits that pluralism has its blemishes and 
does not present a wholly attractive appearance. He quotes 
the remark of a friend that pluralism reminds him of the mo- 
tion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed. “ But while 
I freely admit,” he says, “‘ that pluralism and restlessness are 
repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every 
alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way.” * “ No 
matter what the content of the universe may be, if you only 
allow that it is many everywhere and always, that nothing 
real escapes from having an environment; so far from defeat- 
ing its rationality, as the absolutists so unanimously pretend, 
you leave it in possession of the maximum amount of ra- 
tionality practically attainable by our minds. Your relations 
with it, intellectual, emotional and active, remain fluent and 
congruous with your own nature’s chief demands.” * 

Much more important, however, than any conformity to the 
world of appearance is pluralism’s agreement with ‘“ the moral 
and dramatic expressiveness of life.’’ Pluralism means “ real 
possibilities, real indeterminations,” real beginnings, real ends, 
real evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and 
a real moral life.” ** It does make a “ pragmatically different 
ethical appeal.” Pluralism lets loose the strenuous mood 
“since it makes the world’s salvation depend upon the ener- 
gizing of its several parts, among which we are.” ** It is a 
stimulating view, for its “ disconnections are remedied in part 


40 The Will to Believe and Other Essays, p. 152. 
41 The Will to Believe and Other Essays, p. 177. 
42 4 Pluralistic Universe, p. 319. 

43 The Will to Believe, p. ix. 

44 Meaning of Truth, p. 227. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 61 


by our behavior.” *° This moral and melioristic value and ad- 
vantage of pluralism is so prominent throughout James’s work 
that it needs no emphasis here. 

But a third value of pluralism has not received so much at- 
tention from commentators on James. This is the value of 
religious intimacy. “It surely is a merit in a philosophy,” 
says James, “to make the very life we lead seem real and 
earnest. Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the 
great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus 
redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness.” ** 
Pluralism makes the Deity more approachable. It is as we 
have seen a striking sign of James’s interest in this religious 
value that he is willing to grant that because of it, even ab- 
solute pantheism has an advantage over what he calls the 
“ older theism.” For theism is dualistic. It makes man “an 
outsider and mere subject to God, not his intimate partner.” 

But while James gives pantheism credit for establishing in- 
timacy, he does so only in order to give pluralism more credit 
for establishing a greater degree of intimacy. Pluralism ban- 
ishes the foreignness which accompanied the older theism 
more effectively than pantheism can hope to do. When God 
is a part of the world instead of the whole of it, divinity and 
humanity have more in common. When he is thought of as 
having an environment, as purposeful, as working in time, as 
interested in causes for which we too can strive, he escapes 
the isolation which accompanies the uniqueness of the ab- 
solute. 

The force with which this religious value of pluralism ap- 
pealed to James comes out in some of his more informal ut- 
terances. ‘“‘ Make the world a Pluralism,” he exclaims in the 
letter to G. H. Howison quoted above, “and you forthwith 
have an object to worship.” And to N. S. Shaler he writes 
that polytheism makes for a “warmer” sort of religious 
loyalty. We worship, he says, ‘‘ rather like polytheists . 

a collection of beings who have each contributed and are now 
contributing to the realization of ideals more or less like those 

45 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 330. 46 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 49. 


62 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


for which we live ourselves. This more pluralistic style of 
feeling seems to me both to allow of a warmer sort of loyalty 
to our past helpers and to tally more exactly with the mixed 
condition in which we find the world as to its ideals.” * 

Consistency with appearances, the demands of rationality, 
the moral need for freedom and the religious need of intimacy, 
—all these helped to determine James’s pluralistic bent. 
Which of these is most important for him? Is there priority 
among them? We are on highly speculative ground here, yet 
the topic is so important for our purposes that it is worth while 
to give attention to it. 

One of the ablest writers on James has said that his plural- 
ism flows directly from his theory of knowledge. Yet many 
evidences seem to point to the religious pluralism as primary 
and its implications for knowledge as secondary both tem- 
porally and in interest. Attention may be called to the fact 
that James considered himself a pluralist for some time be- 
fore the niceties of his theory of knowledge were worked out. 
The term pluralism occurs early in James’s works. So does 
the term ‘ radical empiricism,” it is true, with its implications 
for a theory of knowledge. But radical empiricism does not 
specifically denote the doctrine of experienceable relations until 
after the publication of the Varieties in 1902, that is, until 
the last decade of James’s life. It is the religious value of 
pluralism which holds his attention at the beginning. The 
claim is not made that it alone determined the pluralism of 
the theory of knowledge. But it is affirmed that with plural- 
ism established in James’s mind as, on religious and moral 
grounds, the only acceptable philosophy, his imagination, ever 
restless, played with the epistemological implications of the 
pluralism to which he had already been attracted, and pro- 
duced the view of the knowing process set forth in Essays in 
Radical Empiricism. Credence is lent to this interpretation 
of the workings of James’s mind by the fact that the data for 
the theory of knowledge lay, so to speak, ready at hand, and 
capable of being developed into an epistemological pluralism 


47 Letters, 2: 155. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 63 


if James had been interested in such a development. In 1884 
James published in Mind the article ““On Some Omissions of 
Introspective Psychology,” parts of which were later incorpor- 
ated into the Principles, in which he sets forth the importance 
of the “transitive ” states of consciousness. The existence of 
these states he later took as evidence of the perceptual charac- 
ter of relations, which became one of the cardinal tenets of 
his pluralistic theory of knowledge. But if his original interest 
had been epistemological, and if he had been on the lookout 
for data on which to build an epistemological pluralism, is it 
not surprising that he waited twenty years before making these 
applications, especially since during all this period he was 
continually writing of pluralism and showing its advantages? 

Again we may ask, if James’s interest is chiefly epistemo- 
logical, why is it that we find the importance of the individual 
stressed so continually? What place has the individual in “a 
world of pure experience ” ? Consciousness per se does not 
exist in such a world, being merely a name for the grouping 
of elements. Even in the Principles consciousness is made to 
consist in the shifting memories of the past possessed by a suc- 
cession of mental states. Yet we know that individuals and in- 
vidual differences and achievements were for James the all-im- 
portant things in life. This importance is intelligible only on the 
supposition that James’s chief interest lay in the religious and 
moral significance of pluralism. A merely epistemological in- 
terest could not have produced such a result. 

The conclusion seems to be forced upon us that pluralism 
took on life and vividness and meaning for James in its re- 
ligious aspect. He was led to an interest in pluralism at the 
beginning by a pragmatic regard for its efficacy in making 
moral and religious values possible. This strong moral interest 
in pluralism is clearly indicated, as we have seen, in The 
Literary Remains of Henry James published in 1884. That 
an active, strenuous religion calls for a pluralistic belief is set 
forth in The Will to Believe and the essays which follow it. 
That the pragmatic philosophy, making truth dependent on 
value, must also take its stand with pluralism is set forth in the 
volume called Pragmatism, Finally, that pluralism satisfies 


64 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


the peculiarly religious demand for intimacy with the soul of 
the cosmos is brought out in A Pluralistic Universe. As an ad- 
vocate of pluralism James thought in religious terms and of 
religious values. Its implications for a theory of knowledge 
followed both in time and in importance. 

Of the criticisms of pluralism, and they have been many, 
the most important seems to be the claim that the pluralist 
gives up the intellectual battle when it is at its height, and so 
relinquishes his claim to be a thinker. After using the prin- 
ciple of internality, so runs the accusation, for his own pur- 
poses, the pluralist at last stops before a plurality of terms 
or categories and refuses to define further, thus betraying the 
cause to which his humanistic impulse to understand had com- 
mitted him. Pluralism thus cannot be final, for it fails to 
satisfy the urge to comprehend. 
| Yet it seems wholly possible to argue that life presents it- 
_\self to us in terms which are not wholly comprehensible. 
| Pluralism leaves us with mysteries on our hands, but it can- 

not well do otherwise. To take merely one illustration, the 
future is a mystery, and it accords with our sense of the ap- 
propriate that it should be so. For we insist on believing that 
the future is undetermined, and so unknowable. It is worth 
observing that our practical attitude toward the future re- 
tains this belief in its undetermined possibilities, in spite of 
the definite tendency among the sciences of our day, especially 
the biological and psychological, to urge the opposite theory. 
And pluralism claims that its responsiveness to this practi- 
cal attitude is evidence of a more thorough-going desire to be 
inclusive and to make the theory fit all the facts than is mon- 
ism’s laudable but sometimes formalistic tendency to push 
the defining process to the very edges of the cosmos itself. 
The whole question of pluralism and its value will engage 
us again, but it may be well before leaving this discussion to 
suggest that pluralism in many respects has more in common 
with the traditional philosophy of religion than has the monistic 
view with which religion has been more commonly associated. 
| Pluralism makes more direct connection with a conception of 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 65 


the Infinite. It suggests the venturesomeness of the human 
attempt to include all Being in one category. In this respect, 
and especially in its notion of the ‘“ unclassified residuum ”’ it 
leaves room for just that kind of mystery with which religion 
has always been concerned. It represents a protest against the 
view that the world of fact is as small as monism would make 
it. The urge to classify is primal, but it may also be claimed 
that it is eternal, and hardly capable of being satisfied at the 
present stage of man’s development. The very categories of 
the understanding by which the classifying process is carried 
on have come into being, according to James’s view, by rea- 
son of the useful function which they perform in organizing 
our experience. And who shall say that our present form of 
experience may not at some time be superseded? 

There are two kinds of unity which it is desirable to strive 
for but which it also is improbable that we shall ever attain. 
The first is that just hinted at, the unity of the external world 
as an object of the human knowing process. The second is 
the unity of each individual human life. The first kind of 
unity is elusive because the world itself suggests an infinite 
number of possibilities and also because, again from the human 
point of view, it contains so much that sticks out from any 
classification and refuses to be included in any harmonious, 
unified scheme. Insanity is a fact of human experience, yet 
insanity repels all attempts at inclusion in a “ higher synthe- 
sis.” And similarly in each individual life there are experiences 
which do not fit into a unified arrangement. Life comes to us 
as an opportunity to make the best of each situation as it arises. 
It simply will not submit to the monistic yoke. This does not 
mean that man goes from one circumstance to another, recog- 
nizing his helplessness before each. It merely suggests that the 
degree of unity which any one of us can achieve varies with his 
abilities and to some extent with conditions. There are cir- 
cumstances, such as that of death, over which we have little 
control, and the kind of unity which in spite of them we are 
able to attain seems at times meagre in amount and indifferent 
in quality. 


66 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


But pluralism, it cannot be too often asserted, so far from 
being chiefly a philosophy of weakness, is on the moral side 
a philosophy which lays great stress on human creative 
achievement. And the pragmatic pluralism of James, as we 
shall have occasion to observe, in its freedom from abstract- 
ness reaches a kind of unity which is impossible for monistic 
intellectualism itself. It denies the existence of a break be- 
tween the active life and the theoretical description of the 
active life. Truth and value, it claims, grow together out of hu- 
man activity situations. Knowing is a part of the practical 
business of living. All departments of human activity touch 
each other in the unity of the life-process. 

To the monist’s contention that anything else than an intel- 
lectualistic unity is inconsistent because unthinkable, the plu- 
ralist can reply that any philosophy which fails to take 
account of what James called the moral and dramatic expres- 
siveness of life in its lack of inclusiveness is even more un- 
thinkable. And in place of his demand for a final unity the 
pluralist can point to the only kind of unity which life as we 
experience it offers, the unity of an unfolding process rich in 
undetermined possibility. 


IV 
THE FREE WILL 


FTER pluralism, freedom. When we have once been 
released from what James called the ‘‘ monistic super- 
stition ” the way is open to a belief in freedom itself. 

A free choice of freedom is indeed the first step along the 
voluntaristic path which pluralism points. In this and the two 
succeeding chapters we shall notice some of the results of the 
triumph of the active impulses in James’s conflict of moods as 
they are shown in the operation of the free, believing, and pur- 
posive will. The goal achieved by this active aggressive quest 
for religious value will be discussed under the headings, ‘“‘ The 
Deity ” and “ Immortality.”” The passive counterpart, when 
the eager surge of the will is over, and the human spirit waits 
for the touch of a Power which it cannot control, will be 
treated in the chapter on ‘‘ Mysticism.” 

In his brilliant study entitled William James, Captain H. V. 
Knox, whom James in one of his letters calls “‘ an extremely 
fine mind and character,” observes that the question of free 
will is for James the point of transition from psychology to the 
larger problems of philosophy. And James himself calls the 
question of the possibility of volitional attention the “ pivotal 
question of metaphysics, the very hinge on which our picture 
of the world shall swing from materialism, fatalism, monism, 
toward spiritualism, freedom, pluralism,— or else the other 
way.” 1 . 

In James’s own philosophy the question is indeed a pivotal 
one. Some of his principal theories owe their inception to it. 
1 Principles of Psychology, 1: 448. 

67 


68 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


Pluralism, for example, is, in its most important aspect, hardly 
describable except in terms of free will. “‘ The only consistent 
way of representing pluralism and a world whose parts may 
affect one another through their conduct being either good or 
bad is the indeterministic way,” James tells us in the essay on 
“ The Dilemma of Determinism.” And the indeterministic way 
here means the way of free will, for “‘ future human volitions 
are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous things we are 
tempted to believe in.’ Or, expressed in terms of novelty, 
which for James is so distinctly a pluralistic conception: 
“Free will means nothing but real novelty; so pluralism 
accepts the notion of free will.” ” 

Just as important is the relation to free will of meliorism, 
the belief that man can cooperate with God in building a 
better universe. ‘‘ Persons in whom knowledge of the world’s 
past has bred pessimism . . . may naturally welcome free will 
as a melioristic doctrine. It holds up improvement as at least 
possible. . . . Free will is thus a general cosmological theory 
of promise.” * | 

Radical empiricism both offers evidence for freedom, and 
finds in turn that the fact of freedom confirms its own postu- 
lates. Whatever is in experience is real. But volition is an in- 
dubitable fact of experience. The volition which is accom- 
panied by effort makes its presence felt with especial emphasis. 
““ The existence of . . . effort as a phenomenal fact in our con- 
sciousness cannot, of course, be doubted or denied.” * Volition 
for James means attention, and of attention he says: “ We feel 
as 1f we could make it really more or less, and as if our free 
action in this regard were a genuine critical point in nature.” ° 
And again “ Our sense of ‘ freedom’ supposes that some things 
at least are decided here and now.” ® 

But radical empiricism does not merely point to freedom 
as an object of experience. It finds in the fact of free will evi- 

2 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 141. 
3 Pragmatism, p. I10. 
4 Principles of Psychology, 2: 535. 


5 Talks to Teachers, p. tot. 
8 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 139. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES | 69 


dence for its own theory of relations. This theory is expressed 
in the statement that “the relations between things, con- 
junctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of 
direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than 
the things themselves.” * To support this theory radical em- 
piricism is quick to seize upon any evidence it can find of con- 
junctive relations which are obviously experienced. But the 
very experience of change is clearly the experience of a rela- 
tion which binds that which went before to that which is 
coming after. And where is the fact of change more distinct 
than in the experience of deciding between two alternatives? 
As James explains in the essay on ‘‘ The Experience of Activ- 
ity ” that which transcendental idealists have called a category 
of causation and have found to exist only in the synthetic activ- 
ity of the mind itself, is actually found in free will or spiritual 
causation, as a definitely experienceable relation. 

And while radical empiricism thus finds in the study of the 
free will question valuable data for its controversy with ideal- 
ism, pragmatism discovers in the problem of freedom one of 
its excuses for being. For the problem of freedom is one of 
those metaphysical disputes which when left untouched by the 
pragmatic temper are interminable. Again, the fact of free- 
dom and of creative possibility furnishes pragmatism with the 
grounds for its opposition to “rationalism.” “The essential 
contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-made and com- 
plete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the 
making.” * Finally, the importance of freedom for pragmatism 
is hinted at in the fact that according to pragmatism truth is 
a quality which happens to ideas. For if we are free and have 
some control over the circumstances of life, we can bring our 
ideas into a position such that truth will happen to them 
more easily than otherwise. The whole pragmatic philosophy 
must indeed be understood in the light of its belief in the abil- 
ity of the human individual to choose, and through choice to 
create. There is a world of objective fact, tu be sure, but even 
in the realm of truth we must not let the presence of the 


7 The Meaning of Truth, p. xii. 8 Pragmatism, Pp. 257. 


70 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


objective element weigh on us too heavily. Human creative 
achievement plays its part just as truly as does conformity. 
The future is not completely contained in the past. 

But if the future is in any degree independent of the past 
there must be a point at which novelty enters. James’s con- 
tention is that this novel element makes its appearance in the 
purposive activity of the human organism. Not in a meta- 
physical conception of the self, nor yet in a theory of reality 
and its tendencies in the large, apart from human interests, 
but in the choosing and “ carrying-on”’ of the human individ- 
ual do we find a break in the rigid deterministic sequence. 
Somewhat as Darwin, viewing the matter biologically, found 
the secret of progress in the fact of individual variation, James 
rests his case for novelty in the universe on the ultimate re- 
sistance to classification exhibited by each human being with 
his human and individual purposes. Yet the comparison with 
Darwin cannot be carried too far. The deterministic implica- 
tions of the Weissmannian theory of the germ plasm point in 
another direction from that in which James was looking. For 
James each individual differs from his fellows not because 
of the nature of his protoplasmic substance but by virtue of 
his own interests and effort. And the difference shown by each 
individual multiplies itself in the free creative activity which 
each one exerts. 

If novelty and freedom are to be found in the choosing and 
following of ends on the part of the human individual, we may 
expect that the problem of freedom will be at least in part a 
problem in psychology. How important it was for James’s psy- 
chological theory is revealed in the fact that psychology was 
for James essentially a study of the mental process of selec- 
tion. Human life is a continuous choosing between opposing 
interests. By giving our attention to certain things to the 
exclusion of others, we make them real — this is the theme of 
that remarkable chapter on ‘“‘ The Perception of Reality.” So 
the study not only of human life but of reality itself is the 
study of the fact and meaning of the selective process by 
which the human organism is making its way in the world. 





OF WILLIAM }AMES 71 


But while we here have evidence that the problem of free- 
dom is as important for James’s psychology as for his phi- 
losophy, it is instructive to observe that the solution, as James 
consistently asserts, will not be psychological, but ethical.° 
And often as he states that the solution is ethical, still more 
frequently does James suggest that the only way to get at 
whatever freedom there may be is freely to assume it. Like 
the person described in the diverting sketch by Principal L. P. 
Jacks published in the volume Among the Idol Makers James 
is suspicious of constraint even where its object be free- 
dom. The early expression found in a note-book entry dated 
April 30, 1870, ‘“‘ My first act of free will shall be to believe 
in free will,” *° is repeated frequently in his published 
works. 

So the problem of freedom is soluble only by an ethical 
process the first step of which is the practical one of acting 
on the basis of the theory. But before leaving the topic of the 
relation of the free will problem to the various facets of 
James’s thought we should notice that specifically religious 
interests are also involved. ‘“ Not only our morality but our 
religion, so far as the latter is deliberate, depend on the ef- 
fort which we can make.” ‘Our religious life lies . . . on 
the perilous edge.” “ ‘ Will you or won’t you have it so? ’ is the 
most probing question ever asked.” ‘‘ We answer by consents 
or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these 
dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communi- 
cation with the nature of things.” 

The first move in the attempt to understand this “ pivotal 
problem of metaphysics ” whose ramifications affect so vitally 
James’s ideas on pluralism, meliorism, radical empiricism, and 
pragmatism, and for whose solution we must ultimately look to 
the field of ethics and religion, is to take account of the psy- 
chological setting in which it is placed. A preliminary attack 
on the psychological problem is made in the chapter in the 


® Cf. Principles of Psychology, 1: 454; 2: 573. 
10 Letters, 1: 147. 
11 Principles of Psychology, 2: 579. 


72 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


Principles on “The Automaton Theory ” where James explains 
in detail his notion of the selective nature of consciousness. 
‘In the lowest sphere of sense, or in the highest of intellec- 
tion” the function of consciousness is that of selection, empha- 
sis, accentuation. The selective process is carried on in the 
pursuance of ends definitely established by consciousness it- 
self. This is what makes it possible to call human life teleo- 
logical. But if consciousness is useful and purposeful “ it must 
be so through its causal efficaciousness, and the automaton- 
theory must succumb to the theory of common sense.” We 
find, that is to say, that the organism in its conscious activity 
selects that part of its environment which leads to the ends 
that its own consciousness has in turn selected as desirable. 
To live at all is to choose. 

But the highest forms of selection are carried on through 
attending to the desired object or course of action. Here the 
chapter on “‘ Attention ” takes up the thread of the argument. 
In this chapter James breaks definitely with the associationist 
school, and avows his belief in a spontaneously creative psy- 
chical power which uses the data of experience as its materials 
and impresses upon them its own desires and purposes. There 
is an interest that shapes our ends. For my experience is what 
I attend to, and I attend to the things in which I have an in- 
terest. But there exist contrasting kinds of interests, e.g. 
sensuous and ideal, and there are different kinds of attention, 
the most important distinction being that between passive and 
active attention. It is the active and creative attention which 
helps us to deal with the problem of freedom. Its importance 
cannot be overrated. ‘‘ The faculty of voluntarily bringing back 
a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root 
of judgment, character and will.” 

The attending process has two parts —sensory and idea- 
tional. The sensory process is always present, in “ intellec- 
tual” as well as in “sensible ” attention. In the former the 
sensory element consists in a “‘ more or less massive organic 
feeling that attention is going on.” Or, to be specific, while 
attending one has kinaesthetic sensations of movements in the 


OF WILLIAM }AMES' 73 


head. During attention to an idea belonging to a particular 
sense sphere, this movement is related to the sense organ in 
question. Thinking in visual terms, for example, is accom- 
panied by sensations in the eyeballs. 

The reference to kinaesthetic sensations is of course wholly 
in line with James’s marked sensationist tendency. In places 
he seems to fall in line with the thought of the associationist 
school. For example, he compares consciousness, at times, to a 
series of feelings in the throat, effort to a set of muscular sen- 
sations. But the tendency to break away from the sensationist 
view is just as marked. It appears here in the fact that James 
follows up this description of the sensory element with an ac- 
count of the part which has to do with ideas. The intellectual 
experience of attending is of course nothing but idea. But 
the ideal element is also present in the sensory experience as 
an auxiliary, a means of making the sensation more distinct. 
Psychologically, this part of the experience which we call the 
idea may be described as a brain cell played upon from two 
directions. “Whilst the object excites it from without, other 
brain cells, or perhaps spiritual forces, arouse it from within.” 
But which — brain cell or spiritual force? On this hinges the 
question as to whether attention is to be classed as a resultant 
or as in itself creative. But this is the question which psy- 
chology is not equipped to decide. “‘ As mere conceptions the 
effect-theory and the cause-theory of attention are equally 
clear; and whoever affirms either conception to be true must 
do so on metaphysical or universal rather than on scientific 
or particular grounds.” ** 

James leaves us in no doubt as to which way the question 
settles itself for him. He formulates the “ effect” theory 
clearly and forcibly, and says frankly it may be true. But it 
is just as clear, he affirms, that it may not be true. Let us 
ask, for example, just what the effort to attend would ac- 
complish if it were an original force. Briefly, “It would 
_ deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable 
ideas which else would fade more quickly away. The delay 


12 Principles, 1: 448. 


74 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


thus gained might not be more than a second in duration — 
but that second might be critical.” In fact, ‘‘ The whole 
drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, 
slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas may re- 
ceive. But the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and 
excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in 
it things are really being decided from one moment to an- 
other.” And if you claim that this is basing the answer on 
the excitement rather than on the evidence, James would reply 
first that it is only rational to make your answer accord with 
what he elsewhere calls the “dramatic expressiveness of 
life,” and second, as he does here, that what evidence there 
is favors the cause-theory of attention as much as its rival 
The latter is nothing but an argument from analogy, drawn 
from fields where consciousness doesn’t exist and applied to a 
field where it may exist. Such a procedure can hardly claim 
to be called either metaphysical or scientific. 

In the chapter on ‘“ Will”? James has much to say of the 
ideomotor theory. An idea will inevitably reproduce itself in 
action unless another idea occurs to combat it. A person 
would lie in bed indefinitely unless the idea of getting up 
came, at some moment, clearly and definitely into conscious- 
ness, free from the influence of all inhibiting ideas. But it is 
just in this matter of preventing the interference of inhibitions 
that the special fiat of the will is needed. We must attend to 
the chosen idea in order to make it effective. And this atten- 
tion involves deliberate rejection of other ideas. The necessity 
for a particular creative fiat is especially evident in cases 
where a “rarer or more ideal impulse” has to combat others 
“ of a more instinctive and habitual kind.” In these cases 
there is a distinct feeling of effort. The brave man conquers 
his fear, but we do not hear a drunkard say that he conquers 
his better impulses. To follow the more ideal aim is often the 
line of greater, not less resistance. Here James definitely takes 
sides with Aristotle, Ovid, and Paul, as against Socrates and 
Plato. The idea of the action produces the action, but this 
does not mean that wisdom, or the contemplation of the ideal, 


OF WILLIAM JAMES 75 


and aggressively virtuous effort are one and the same thing. 
The facts of experience do not bear out such a theory. In a 
letter to Shadworth Hodgson*'* James cries out, after the 
manner of Paul, “‘ I see the better, and in the very act of see- 
ing it I do the worse.” The fact is, as is shown in the Prin- 
ciples, that in order to produce conduct that is good, the idea 
must be attended to, that is, it must be held forcibly in the 
center of the field of consciousness, while inhibiting ideas 
are dismissed. But to talk of holding an idea forcibly is of 
course to depart decisively from the theories of the associa- 
tionist school. Instead of leaving the matter to the passive 
play of ideas, James puts it squarely up to the human in- 
dividual and his capacity to make an effort. Where the course 
of action to be followed is that of the greatest, not the least, 
resistance, a proportionate amount of effort must be brought 
into play. This means, of course, a denial of hedonism. That 
ideas of pleasure and pain play a large part in determining 
our conduct James admits. But this part is limited to the 
aid they can render the self in holding to some ideas and 
dismissing others. And in this their influence alone is not 
sufficient. 

Thus “‘ the whole drama is a mental drama ” ** and inciden- 
tally James here clearly contradicts what he had previously 
said of how “the only ends which follow immediately upon 
our willing seem to be movements of our own bodies.” *® The 
action takes place within our minds and the immediate result, 
the acceptance of one idea and rejection of others, seems to 
be wholly a psychical process. Effort of attention is the es- 
sential phenomenon of will. The desirable idea must be held 
steadily before the mind until it fills the mind. Moral effort 
consists in concentrated attention, and conversely “ to sustain 
a representation, to think, is . . . the only moral act.” But 
because attention often carries with it the element of “ express 
consent to the reality of what is attended to,” and because 
James does not find that this element of consent can be re- 
solved into any more ultimate psychological components, he 


18 Letters, 1: 245. 14 Principles, 2: 564. 15 Principles, 2: 486. 


76 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


comes to the conclusion that the problem of free will is in- 
soluble psychologically. 

But this is far from being the last word on the subject. 
Our psychological evidences are incomplete, but other data 
are not lacking. We have the feeling that we actually make 
an effort in the face of obstacles, and throw into our task more 
or less of energy as we choose. We also have an inescapable 
sense of responsibility. There are certain courses of action 
which we simply could not take and remain conscience-free. 
This is as indubitable a fact of experience as any. We have, 
furthermore, a clearly defined consciousness of the unpre- 
dictable character of all life. Human biographies will never be 
written in advance, of this we are sure. Obviously, it is our 
part to meet this situation with a true pragmatic sense of the 
values involved and in a manner which, pending the discovery 
of new evidence, will be helpful in meeting the problems of 
daily experience. Living in a world which demands moral 
and practical solutions for the very practical life that we lead, 
we find suspension of judgment impossible and an active 
attitude a necessity. 

To get at James’s moral solution for the problem of freedom 
we must leave his psychological work and turn to the essay on 
“The Dilemma of Determinism” now printed in The Will to 
Believe and Other Essays. In this essay James points out, as 
he does elsewhere, that the horrors of indeterminism are not as 
bad as they have been painted by those on the other side of 
the argument. Here, as in his defense of pluralism, James 
says he is not contending for complete separation between 
things, for a chaos or a nulli-verse. Even “ chance,” a word to 
which more opprobrium is attached than to the word “ free- 
dom,” does not mean anything so very heretical. James takes 
up the cudgels for ‘‘ chance ” so vigorously that his philosophy 
has been called a “tychism” by some commentators, ¢.g., 
Flournoy and W. K. Wright. But the word he himself used 
most frequently was “‘ indeterminism.” He chooses ‘“ chance” 
as opposed to ‘“‘freedom ” in order, he says, that the argument 
may stand on its own feet and not appeal unfairly to senti- 
ment. 


OF WILLIAM AMES ti 


But now, following the thought in ‘“ The Dilemma of De- 
terminism,” suppose we admit chance into the world. Does 
the universe thereby fall to pieces? Certainly not, for as 
chance works out in our experience its effects are hardly no- 
ticeable to an outside observer. “Is anyone ever tempted to 
produce an absolute accident, something utterly irrelevant 
to the rest of the world?” All futures, whether made by 
chance or not, spring from the soil of the past. The chance 
that comes into our experience does not bring with it a com- 
plete break with all that we have known. A train is the same 
train, no matter which way the switch is turned. Similarly 
the world is just as continuous with itself for the believer 
in chance as for the strict determinist. Suppose one is faced 
with the alternative of walking home via Divinity Avenue or 
via Oxford Street. After the fact, either course appears as 
natural, as continuous with the past, as the other. So why 
this great outcry over the split-off nature of the undetermined 
future? If the results of chance appear no otherwise than the 
results of rational necessity, the difference between them can- 
not be so catastrophic. We have already seen that pluralism 
is much more innocent than its opponents have assumed. So, 
“make as great an uproar about chance as you please,” says 
James, “I know that chance means pluralism and nothing 
more.” *® As a matter of fact, the word “chance” is merely 
a negative term, “giving us no information about that of 
which it is predicated, except that it happens to be discon- 
nected with something else.” *” Or, looking at it in another 
way, the idea of chance is like the idea of a gift, ‘“‘ the one 
simply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic name 
for anything on which we have no effective claim.” ** 

Chance is rendered still more innocuous when we under- 
stand how limited is the field of its application. Our experi- 
ence reveals varying spans of activity with various degrees of 
independence of each other. In studying the psychology of the 
question we found, also, that freedom is limited to the func- 

16 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 178. 


17 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 154. 
18 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 159, cf. Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 274, 


78 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


tion of conscious selection and voluntary attention. This 
makes absurd the contentions of some determinists that if man 
were free his life would be one series of wild and wholly un- 
predictable vagaries. For example, it is nonsense for Spencer 
to say that psychical changes either conform to law or they 
do not, and if they do not no science of psychology is possible. 
Or for John Fiske to declare in a similar strain that volitions 
are either caused, or they are not, and that if they are not 
caused, an inexorable logic brings us to absurdities. Or for 
Professor Fullerton to claim that if there be free will, a man’s 
previous character can have no influence over his actions. Or 
for Mr. McTaggart to tell us that if Nero were “ free” at the 
moment of ordering his mother’s murder he could not be called 
a bad man, or that if there were freedom a majority of Lon- 
doners would burn themselves alive tomorrow. These violent 
caricatures of the free will position arise from their authors’ 
failure to observe the narrowly circumscribed limits within 
which freedom can operate if it operates at all. Indeterminists 
do not claim that any conceivable act is possible for any man. 
Their claim is merely that among several alternatives which 
really tempt a man, more than one is possible. 

So interpreted indeterminism appears less abortive, espe- 
cially when we examine the grounds on which the other al- 
ternative is based. Consider the principle of causality: it is 
merely a postulate, a name which stands for the demand that 
there be something more fundamental in a sequence of events 
than mere contiguity and nearness. It is, says James, as much 
an altar to an unknown god as the one St. Paul found at 
Athens. In fact “All our scientific and philosophical ideals 
are altars to unknown gods. Uniformity is as much so as is 
free will.” In the last analysis the principle of causality is 
merely one of the demands we human beings make upon the 
universe. Why should not our moral demands be as impor- 
tant as the demand for a uniform sequence? The one, says 
James, is quite as subjective and emotional as the other. 

The fact is that it is determinism, not its rival, which is the 
monstrous conception. A world which contains such an event as 


OF WILLIAM ‘AMES 79 


a murder is a world which must be called on to explain its con- 
duct. It is unthinkable that such an occurrence should be the 
goal of cosmic history up to that moment. But if you say this, 
or if you even show distress at the murder and confess that the 
world would have been better off without it, you are expressing 
a judgment of regret, — that is, you are saying that something 
ought not to have been, and that something else ought to have 
been in its stead. So determinism, denying that anything else 
could have taken place, plunges into pessimism. On a deter- 
ministic basis, regret for the murder leads to regret for the 
universe in which the murder was unavoidable. As James ex- 
presses it in the letter to Hodgson, quoted above, ‘‘ The ques- 
tion of free will owes its entire being to a difficulty you dis- 
dain to notice, namely, that we cannot rejoice in such a whole, 
for it is mot a palpable optimism, and yet, if it be predeter- 
mined, we must treat it as a whole. Indeterminism is the only 
way to break the world into good parts and into bad and to 
stand by the former as against the latter.” *° 

In this judgment of regret lies the first dilemma of deter- 
minism. For if we try to escape from pessimism by calling our 
judgment of regret wrong, and take refuge in the idea of some 
higher synthesis in which the evil is atoned for, we find that 
we cannot transform our judgment to one of approval, since 
in our deterministic scheme the original quality of regret was 
determined. So we may rescue the event, but in so doing the 
judgment remains fast in the mire. If the murder is good, the 
judgment is bad; and if the judgment is good, the murder is 
bad. But both have been predetermined, so our determinism 
lands us in a dilemma as well as in pessimism. 

One remedy for this dilemma is to adopt the point of view 
of subjectivism. If the world exists simply that we may know 
it, and that our consciousness of good and evil may be refined; 
if the purpose of the universe be not the creation of any ex- 
ternal good but merely our own subjective growth in knowl- 
edge — then the regret and the deed may both be good at the 
same time. So here we have the second, and the really im- 


19 Letters, 1: 245. 


80 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


portant dilemma of determinism. Pessimism or subjectivism, 
as determinists we must accept one or the other. 

Naturally we do not expect James to accept either. Pes- 
simism is intrinsically abhorrent. And the results of subjec- 
tivism have been in theology, antinomianism; in literature, 
romanticism; in practical life, sentimentalism.*° James’s es- 
cape from both horns of the dilemma is truly pragmatic, 
though this word does not appear. He quotes Carlyle as urg- 
ing: “‘ Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, and get 
to Work like men! ” and continues the thought by saying that 
conduct and not sensibility is our chief interest. We see before 
us “certain works to be done, certain outward changes to be 
wrought or resisted.” Like a Stoic or Kantian rigorist em- 
phasizing the nobility of the daily task, James exclaims: “ No 
matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in the outward act 
and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far be safe, and 
we quit of our debt towards it.” ” 

Significantly for our interest in James’s religious attitude, 
he does not leave the matter here, but goes on to explain that 
this attempt on man’s part to take care for the future is not 
irreconcilable with the notion of a governing Providence. 
Here he introduces the famous figure of two players before 
a chess board, a figure which once more suggests how near the 
absolute loomed in the background of his thinking. One of the 
contestants knows all the possibilities which confront the other, 
and is able to counter every advance that the other makes. 
Just so the finite player of the game of life may have real 
power of decision at each crisis, without interfering with the 
Divine power and plan. This arrangement would make pos- 
sible the very thing that determinism denies, that is, actual 
decisions here and now. But if it all has been planned out in 
advance, says James, then may you and I have been deter- 
mined to believe in liberty! . 

James often asserts that his general treatment of the prob- 


20 Cf. review of Renan’s “ Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques,” Nation, 
1876, reprinted in Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 36 ff. 
#1 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 174. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 81 


lem of freedom followed Renouvier * and once he mentions 
Lotze.** The “ neo-critical ” position of Renouvier is indeed 
similar to that of James on this subject ** but any topic taken 
up by James’s fertile imagination was endowed with new life 
and color, and was always treated in such a highly original 
manner that it became virtually a new contribution. Rarely 
has the age-old problem of freedom been given the vividness 
which it receives at James’s hand. But for him it was a vital 
issue. Novelty, possibility, freedom, individuality, creative 
achievement — these are key words in James’s philosophy. 
Paradoxical as it seems, there must be freedom. But “ must ” 
here suggests the compulsion of the moral life, not of a closed 
deterministic sequence. Freedom is necessary if moral and re- 
ligious values are to remain attainable. The question is pivotal 
because its moral implications are so far-reaching. To the un- 
usual and unacademic application of his theory to religious 
belief we must now turn. 

22 Cf. Letters, 1: 147, 163; Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 185. 

23 Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 304. 


24 Cf. e.g. Esquisse d’une Classification systématique, 2: 396; also Arnal: 
La Philosophie religieuse de Ch. Renouvier, p. 72. 


V 
THE BELIEVING WILL 


N MORAL grounds James has established man’s free- 
dom to choose between alternative courses of action. 
Does this freedom extend into the realm of beliefs? 
We may have the power to decide how we shall act, but have 
we any choice as to how we shall think? In our intellectual 
life does not the whole world of objective, external fact stand 
over against us to determine for us what our beliefs shall be? 
Many framers of philosophical systems have not thought 
so. The springs of belief are internal as external and both on 
psychological grounds and as a matter of metaphysical theory 
many thinkers have subordinated the intellectual to the voli- 
tional, conative aspect of life. The two contrasting positions 
have often been found side by side in history. One may re- 
mark, for example, the difference in emphasis which in the 
days before Socrates obtained between the philosophers, 
largely of a rationalistic turn of mind, who lived on the shores 
of the Aegean Sea and those of Pythagorean and Orphic per- 
suasion who made their home in Italy. The contrast which the 
Greek tradition as a whole, with its confidence in the ability 
of the intellect, made with the moral conscientiousness of the 
Hebrews has often been pointed out. A similar contrast is 
found in the early days of Christianity between the Johannine 
and Pauline systems of theology. In the Middle Ages the 
difference crops up again in the contrasting views of Domini- 
cans and Franciscans, or of Thomists and Scotists in philoso- 
phy, while in more recent times we have the Romantic move- 
ment growing out of the period of the Enlightenment. 


82 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 83 


James frequently expressed his lack of sympathy for Kant, 
yet it remains true that Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of the 
practical reason over the reason that is theoretical had many 
points in common with James’s notion of the will to believe. 
Fichte also makes the will take precedence over the intellect 
in his postulation of duty as an ultimate datum on which even 
the knowing process is dependent. Pascal, in a less formal 
manner, suggests the sure authority of religious faith in his 
much-quoted observation: ‘“‘ Le cceur a ses raisons, que la 
raison ne connait pas.” Like Pascal the Romanticists take a 
position of which James would approve in their insistence that 
reality itself is not knowable in intellectual terms exclusively. 
Schleiermacher in the Reden makes an especially forceful ap- 
peal for the non-intellectual character of religion and Ritschl, 
whose theology is based in part on Schleiermacher, makes 
close contacts with James in his discussion of value-judg- 
ments, his stress on the necessity of man’s asserting his in- 
dependence of the world of nature and creating his ideals in 
the world of the spirit, in his assertion that belief in God is 
necessary to bring about the victory of the moral ideal, and 
in his condemnation of the absolute as an idolatrous object 
totally unfit to be worshipped! 

The line of influence from Pascal to James may be traced 
not only through the German Romanticists but also through 
the French neo-criticist, Renouvier. James’s use of Pascal’s 
famous wager, as an illustration of the way in which our de- 
sires may influence our beliefs, is well known. In The Will to 
Believe James argues, it will be remembered, that if the issue 
is a genuine one, is living, and forced, and momentous, then 
“Pascal’s argument, instead of being powerless, . . . seems a 
regular clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our 
faith in masses and holy water complete.”’* John Locke had 
used a similar illustration in his Essay.? Renouvier also shows 
an interest in Pascal’s wager. In his Esquisse d’une Classifica- 
tion systématique * he represents a proponent for Pascal as 
saying: “ Dieu est ou il n’est pas. Mais de quel cété pen- 


A RW Ge o> 2 2 Ln 70, a 25555 


84 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


cherons-nous? La raison n’y peut rien déterminer.” Yet, as 
Renouvier goes on to show, Pascal’s setting of the conditions 
is not wholly accurate. “Le vice radical du pari de Pascal, 
c’est que ce pari porte sur la vérité ou la fausseté d’un dogme 
trop défini.” It is not a question of “ Dieu est, ou il n’est pas,” 
it is rather, as he shows clearly in La Nouvelle Monadologie, 
a question “du monde moral et de la vie future.” “‘ Dans ces 
termes, la correction du pari moral ne serait pas facilement 
contestée, comme elle a pu l’étre, sous d’autres formes.” * And, 
as Renouvier later shows us, his chief objection is that “ce 
dilemme, Vargumentation de Pascal le fait, au fond, porter 
sur la foi et le culte catholiques, d’une part, et sur la vie hors 
de cette religion, de autre.” ° Pascal has argued, “ Vous étes 
embarqué.” You are placed here, and the conditions are 
forced upon you. But you are not forced, Renouvier replies, 
to choose between the Catholic faith and utter darkness. The 
issue is a moral one. The question as to whether or not there 
is a moral order cannot be answered with apodictic knowledge, 
but must be settled by belief. And, ‘‘ Vintérét ” is a legitimate 
factor in belief. Just as he freely chose to believe in free- 
dom, so Renouvier postulates a moral world-order, “ tak- 
ing a chance” in each case, and allowing what James later 
called “our passional nature” to have a voice in the 
decision. 

_~In England also we find an anticipation of James’s views in 
the tendency of some British thinkers to lay stress on the 
‘claims of “ belief’ as opposed to those of “ reason.’’ Thomas 
Reid, for example, maintained that life is more fundamental 
than reason or logic, that beliefs grow directly out of the 
needs of life and furnish the basis for arguments instead of de- 
pending on them. Sir William Hamilton also has a part in this 
“* anti-intellectualist > movement by virtue of his attempt to 
show from the contradictions in our notions of the infinite and 
the absolute that religious belief must rest on faith rather 
than on logic. What cannot be known must, where the great 
issues of life are at stake, be believed. Dean Mansel in his 


4 Pp. 457-8. ae AB. 3 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 85 


Bampton lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought also 
deals rationalism a blow by maintaining that the truths which 
guide our practice cannot be reduced to principles which 
satisfy our reason, in the religious or in any other realm. 

In recent years Mr. Balfour has taken these philosophi- 
cally agnostic conclusions of some of his countrymen and 
attempted, as he says, “to develop the negative speculations 
of philosophic doubt into a constructive, if provisional, sys- 
tem.” At least one of his conclusions seems to have been in 
agreement with those of his predecessors, namely, that the 
system of axioms and postulates on which science is based is 
as tentative as the similar system underlying religious belief, 
the chief difference being that Balfour was interested in the 
postulates of science, while the others, working before the 
present era of pervasive scientific activity, were interested 
rather in comparing the truths of religion with “ intuitive ” 
truths about knowledge and about practical life. But Bal- 
four’s scientific interest does not prevent him from having an 
interest also in the demands of the practical life. Science de- 
mands a practical working faith and indeed the mere process 
of living from day to day demands it as well. Most important 
is it that man keep his faith in ethical as well as scientific 
ideals. Like James in his most pragmatic moods Balfour makes 
much of the inadequacy of any system of belief which fails 
to substantiate and make legitimate man’s moral aspirations. 
For him as for James the intellectual demand for consistency 
is only one human demand among others and does not take 
precedence over the rest. 

Mr. Balfour’s work shows many interesting parallels to 
James’s thought, notably in his demand for concreteness in 
religion, and especially for a limited God,° in his assurance 
that the hypothesis of a personal deity satisfies the largest 
number of moral and religious requirements,’ but in nothing 
more than in his conviction, already referred to, “ that in ac- 
cepting science, as we all do, we are moved by ‘ values’ not 


6 E.g. The Foundations of Belief, pp. 359-60. 
7 Cf. The Foundations of Belief, p. 344; Theism and Humanism, pp. 125-34. 


86 RELIGIONGIN (\THEGPAHILOSOPHY 


by logic.” * So it is interesting to find this passage in a letter 
written by William James to his brother Henry, dated April 
26, 1895 (a few months before the address on ‘‘ The Will to 
Believe ” was first delivered): “ I have been reading Balfour’s 
Foundations of Belief with immense gusto. It almost makes 
me a Liberal-Unionist! If I mistake not, it will have a pro- 
found effect eventually, and it is a pleasure to see old Eng- 
land coming to the fore every time with some big stroke. 
There is more real philosophy in such a book than in fifty 
German ones of which the eminence consists in heaping up 
subtleties and technicalities about the subject. The English 
genius makes the vitals plain by scuffing the technicalities 
away. B. is a great man.” 

Some parts of Royce’s work exhibit a striking similarity to 
James’s theory of the will to believe, particularly the ninth 
chapter of Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. We 
may recall that in “ The Dilemma of Determinism ” James had 
said that our moral demands on the universe were as authori- 
tative as our intellectual demands. And Royce tells us that 
if a man abandon religion’s postulate that goodness is at the 
heart of things he ought also to abandon the postulate of 
science that order and reason are the truth of things. But 
to do either is to be cowardly. For, says Royce, you are placed 
in a world of confusion, yet you assert that ultimately it must 
meet your intellectual needs and be a world of order. Is it 
any more presumptuous to assert that it must meet your 
ethical needs and have righteousness at its heart? Why is 
one postulate not made as readily as the other? Is the ethical 
need the less important? Postulates are voluntary assump- 
tions of a risk for the sake of a higher end. They take a 
chance, but they do it courageously and intelligently, whereas 
mere blind faith is unintelligent and cowardly. The sea-cap- 
tain postulates that he will get to harbor, the general that he 
will beat the enemy. We all postulate that our lives are worth 
the trouble. Indeed the wise live by postulates. 


8 Art. ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt,” Hibbert Journal, 
October ro11, p. 5. 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 84 


We hear men say, Royce goes on, that they will believe what 
the facts force on them. But each of us determines what he 
will believe by determining what he will give his attention 
to. A foreign language may be mere jargon, or it may be 
made intelligible by our attention, as we listen. Through our 
attention we exert an active force on experience, and this ac- 
tive element in knowledge is fully as much to be reckoned 
with as is the passive play of sensations and ideas. As for prej- 
udice, we all have it, because we all create experience in ad- 
dition to receiving it. The great question is simply: ‘“ In what 
sense, to what degree, with what motive, for what end, may 
I and should I be prejudiced? ” So we go on living with faith 
that the highest reality is with and not against us, just as we 
try to understand the world with the faith that the highest 
reality conforms to reason. The risk in both cases is one 
which it would be ignoble to avoid. 

In Friedrich Paulsen we find nearly as intimate a relation 
to James’s thought as is exhibited in Royce. James and Paul- 
sen believed in each other. James wrote an introduction to 
Thilly’s translation of Paulsen’s Einleitung in die Philosophie 
and praised Paulsen for his anti-absolutism. Not to be out- 
done, Paulsen wrote a Geleitwort for Lorenz’s translation into 
German of the Will to Believe as Der Wille zum Glauben 
(1899) in which he placed James in the Kantian succes- 
sion, saying: ‘‘ Professor James steht in einer Reihe, deren 
Richtungslinie durch die Namen Hume, Kant, Fichte, Carlyle 
bezeichnet ist; auf positivischer Unterlage eine idealistische 
Weltanschauung mit energistischer Tendenz.” Then in ex- 
planation: “‘ Der Wille bestimmt das Leben, das ist sein Ur- 
recht; also wird er auch ein Recht haben, auf die Gedanken 
einen Einfluss zu uben.” 

And not only in this Geleitwort but in the Einleitung in 
die Philosophie also one feels the spirit of James, especially 
in the section on “ Knowledge and Faith” which sets forth 
Paulsen’s own will-to-believe theory. In the seventh (Ger- 
man) edition Paulsen mentions James’s view in this connection 
as similar to his own. Philosophy, Paulsen says, is not a prod- 


88 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


uct of the understanding merely, but of a man’s entire person- 
ality. The will, the revolt against the miserable present, 
determines the direction of the personality and arouses its 
passions. The origin of our convictions is to be sought in our 
own experience. You cannot prove the truth of your view to 
one who does not share your loves, your hates, your hopes, and 
your ideals. Paulsen is truly pragmatic in his criterion, for he 
leaves the decision as to the correctness of one’s view to the 
future. But the peculiarity of the future is that it is acces- 
sible through faith, not through knowledge. Faith is in this 
sense the formal principle of every philosophy. 

Faith, will, future verification, empirical approach, subjec- 
tive convictions, temperamental passional decisions! With 
these as a sympathetic avenue of approach we should be ready 
for a discussion of James’s own theory. 

The tendencies which later found expression in the famous 
‘“‘ Will to Believe ” doctrine are clearly seen in some of James’s 
earlier work. As early as the ’7os he was actively rebelling 
against the notion that the truth ideal, ‘“‘ Truth with a capital 
T,” was something which required only passive obedience on 
the part of humankind. In contrast to this he seemed eager 
to bring out the active nature of the knowing process and the 
creative part played by man, both in the fact that by paying 
attention to the flux of experience he creates order out of chaos 
and also in the fact that man in a sense creates his own en- 
vironment by following his interests and desires and insisting 
upon the reality for himself of their objects. And James also 
seems to have been impressed by the importance of man’s con- 
tributions to other ideals beside the intellectual. There are as 
many ideals, as many ‘“ goods,” as there are human desires. 
The only question is, when they conflict, what standard is 
one to apply in order to determine which should have pre- 
cedence? The answer is not far to seek, however, for evolu- 
tion is showing us that the cosmos itself is revealing a stand- 
ard. When man judges rightly, among his conflicting desires, 
he succeeds in the game of life. 

In this sense, all human activity is intensely practical. In 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 89 


fact, “the theorizing faculty . . . functions exclusively for 
the sake of ends that . . . are set by our emotional and prac- 
tical subjectivity.” ° The truth-attaining end is one of a num- 
ber of such ends and must compete on equal terms with the 
others, the standard by which its claims are judged being that 
of practical utility. Humanity is caught in the onward rush 
of a biological process, of which the ultimate tests are prac- 
tical. But “practical” must not be interpreted too narrowly. 
Activity which serves the highest interests of the race is prac- 
tical, but not invidiously so. Considered from the point of 
view of racial aims and interests, there may be practical pur- 
poses which are at the same time ideal. But their ideal quality 
is transfused with the conditions and objectives of the con- 
text of human experience out of which they have sprung. 
Apart from the larger human concerns they can have no 
meaning. 

These two ideas, that truth-attainment is one of many 
human interests all arising out of man’s subjective nature, and 
determined ultimately by the practical character of the biologi- 
cal process, and that in truth-attainment the active element 
with its attendant risk is as important as the passive, were 
joined with a third idea, that belief in a certain outcome helps 
to effect that outcome, to form the nucleus of the essay on 
“The Will to Believe” and the other essays in the same vol- 
ume which express a similar attitude. 

“The Will to Believe ” begins with a discussion of hypothe- 
ses, showing that a hypothesis to be eligible for free choice 
must be living, forced, and momentous. When a hypothesis 
conforming to these conditions is present, our non-intellectual 
nature is sure to influence our decision. Now, argues James, 
it is true not only that our passional nature may enter into 
certain decisions, it is also true that in many cases it is the 
only deciding factor. Many and many a time we simply can- 
not wait for complete knowledge. The evidence will not be in 
during our span of life, or perhaps not until the life of the 
race is over. So, since we cannot have all the evidence, we 


9 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 117. 


go RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


must decide on other than purely evidential grounds. For to 
refuse to decide is itself a decision. To wait is not to act. To 
hesitate is to make a passional decision as truly as to act with- 
out waiting for all the evidence. 

James goes on to claim that this necessity for a passional 
decision is empiricism’s view of the whole matter. Objective 
evidence is a fine thing to have, but how can we know surely 
when we have it? The absolutist thinks that he does know 
when his evidence is infallible, but for the empiricist it is im- 
_ possible to be certain when one has attained certainty. “‘ There 
is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that 
pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that 
the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That how- 
ever is the bare starting point of knowledge, the mere admis- 
sion of the stuff to be philosophized about.” This, however, is 
not saying that truth is unattainable; it is merely transferring 
truth from the past to the future. Here James gives us a 
clear forecast of pragmatism, in this volume which appeared 
ten years before the book by that name was written, espe- 
cially when he says of the empiricist and his hypothesis, “ if 
the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is 
what he means by its being true.” 

But now what are some of these questions which we cannot 
wait to decide? Well, all moral questions, all value judgments 
as Ritschl or Lotze would say, being decisions not as to what 
is, but as to what ought to be, are questions involving some- 
thing more than merely intellectual evidence. ‘‘ If your heart 
does not want a world of moral reality, your head will as- 
suredly never make you believe in one.” Such a matter de- 
mands the attention of the whole nature and is not satisfied 
with a judgment of the intellect alone. And beside general 
questions of value there are certain questions as to future fact, 
cases where faith in a certain outcome helps to bring it to 
pass. You win promotions if you believe that you can win 
them, you jump to safety if you don’t doubt your own ability. 

In religion all these cases are found. Religious faith offers 
an option that is forced and living and momentous. Yet who 


OF WILLIAM ‘AMES gI 


can ever attain to a knowledge of all the evidence? The emo- | 
tions are bound to play their part in this decision, the only | 
question is, which emotion shall it be? Shall we allow ourselves | 
to be influenced more by our hope for religion’s benefits, or by 

our fear that we may make a mistake? ‘ Dupery for dupery;/ 
what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse 

than dupery through fear?’ And here James takes a more\ 
radical step. May we not, he asks, help to create the truths! 
of religion by believing them? 

“This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by 
obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do 
so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are 
doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of 
the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothe- 
sis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure in- 
tellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, 
would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympa- 
thetic nature would be logically required. I therefore, for one, 
cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth- 
seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of 
the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of 
thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowl- 
edging certain kinds of truth if these kinds of truth were really 
there, would be an irrational rule.” *° 

So the kind of rationality to which as empiricists and anti- 
absolutists we must come, thinks James, is the rationality of 
religious belief, and since all belief is measured by action, we 
must come to religious activity. Realizing the risk, but realiz- 
ing also that there is a risk whichever way we turn, is it not 
the part of courage as well as of rationality to champion the 
positive alternative, postulate a religious reality at the heart 
of things, and let loose in ourselves the activity which only a 
religious environment can call forth? Is it not clear that this 
is both the creative and the reasonable decision, since the 
event may depend upon our choice? Shall we not seize the al- 
ternative of promise, glorying in our ability to do so! In later 


10 The Will to Believe, p. 28. 


92 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


works James twice alludes to what he calls a “ faith ladder,” 
showing the series of steps, not one of them logical, by which 
beliefs enter the mind: 

‘‘A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no 
matter how. Is it true or not? you ask. 

It might be true somewhere, you say, for it is not self- 
contradictory. 

It may be true, you continue, even here and now. 

It is fit to be true, it would be well if it were true, it ought 
to be true, you presently feel. 

It must be true, something persuasive in you whispers next, 
and then — as a final result — 

It shall be held for true, you decide; it shall be as if true for 
you. 

And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a 
means of making it securely true in the end.” ** 

One of the features of this whole discussion which James 
was most eager to emphasize, and which he felt his critics 
overlooked, was the circumscribed region in which the “ will ” 
or the ‘‘passional nature” can operate. His critics, he often 
claimed, seized upon what he called the catchpenny title 
“Will to Believe’ which should have been “ The Right to 
Believe,” and without paying any attention to his real argu- 
ment had accused him of making such foolish assertions as 
that a person may believe anything he wishes and make it the 
truth. Whereas the argument strove to show that im certain 
cases the unaided intellect fails us, since the means for a 
purely intellectual decision are simply not at hand. In such 
cases we actually do make a passional decision, whether or 
not we realize that we are doing so. In fact, the intellectualist 
critics of the theory are themselves making “‘ passional ” deci- 
sions and exercising their “ will to believe ” in their very choice 
of a philosophic standpoint. 

This brief sketch of the essay on “ The Will to Believe ” 
should serve to bring out its three distinctive emphases men- 
tioned above: the stress on the importance of the subjective 


11 4 Pluralistic Universe, pp. 328-0. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 93 


factor in beliefs and in truth itself, on their practical nature, 
and on the creative part which man himself plays in the mak- 
ing of truth. We are so accustomed to the notion of truth as 
having to do only with the world of objective fact, and of be- 
liefs as acceptable only if based on evidence which is entirely 
external to the believer, that the possibility of subjective evi- 
dence is likely not to occur to us. Yet James has just at this 
point made a most important contribution to the philosophy of 
religion. This question of objective, external evidence must 
not be made too much of a fetish — such seems to be James’s 
idea. Obviously it is all-important when we have it. But when 
the question is one of religious belief science does not carry 
us very far either way. And why should we be afraid, in such 
a case, to trust what we call our subjective impulses, our faiths 
and aspirations? Why should we not recognize at the outset 
that they are no more subjective than our desire for intellect- 
ual consistency itself? ‘‘ Hardly a law has been established in 
science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought 
after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need.” * 
“But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is 
a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is 
just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the 
inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a pro- 
fessionally scientific head.” ** Our moral demand on the uni- 
verse is as trustworthy as is our requirement that there be a 
uniform sequence, ‘‘ the one demand being, so far as I can 
see, quite as subjective and emotional as the other is.” “ 
Clearly we are well on the way to religious belief if our 
right to draw on our subjective life for evidence is vindicated. 
To trust his aspirations and hopes is just what the religious 
man has always been eager to do. But too often he has been 
fearful or cautiously meticulous about a complete and final 
consistency, something which in the nature of things, with 
our limited span of life and exceedingly slight knowledge of 
the universe, may never be possible. It is important, indeed, 
to be consistent, but it is also important to weave as many 


12 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 55. 18 Jbid., p. 56.. +* Ibid. p. 147. 


04 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


as possible of the facts that do enter our experience into our 
consistent web. The pragmatic philosophy, in James’s hands, 
has from the beginning emphasized the need of taking ac- 
count, in all our intellectual analyses, of other elements than 
the purely formal, and of realizing that analysis itself is a 
less complete thing than life in its fullness and richness. 

No less unavoidable than the subjective factor in religious 
belief is the practical. Subjective demands are but practical 
postulates. They are demands made on life in the interests of 
the human organism, a part of its attempt not merely to adapt 
itself to the environment, but to adapt its environment to it- 
self. One test of the legitimacy of these demands is their 
efficacy in this adjusting, creating process. Ideas, according 
to the pragmatic view, are but means to practical adjustment. 
Consciousness itself functions for practical ends. The line 
traditionally drawn between theory and practice is an artificial 
one. Metaphysically there is no convincing evidence for point- 
ing to the experience of an absolute as distinct from that 
which comes to us in practical life here and now. Ethically 
there are many evidences against the belief in anything which 
minimizes the reality of the moral struggle. Psychologically 
we find the fact that consciousness is an instrument of adapta- 
tion. Our religious beliefs function in a practical manner and 
are tested by their results only in the sense in which all in- 
tellectual activity is ultimately practical. And since all our 
beliefs are being refined in the furnace of experience, and since 
the truth or falsity of our ideas is known by their ability or 
lack of ability to help us, it is accurate to say that truth it- 
self is being built up as a body of ideas which prove them- 
selves by their working. 

But “ practicality ” here leads to creativity. For if in the 
case of beliefs we make success, or practical working out, 
the criterion of adequacy we put a part of the responsibility 
for the success of the belief squarely on the shoulders of the 
believer. If, for example, the alternative be that between 
optimism and pessimism, an enthusiastic advocacy of the 
former may help to justify the belief in it. The world is good, 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 95 


we may say, for it shall be made good by our efforts. There 
are cases where belief in a possibility helps that possibility to 
realize itself. Your active attitude may be instrumental in 
creating the reality of the thing that you postulate. But, if 
this be so, is it not wholly absurd to accept any theory of 
truth which prevents you from assuming the attitude by which 
alone the possible is brought to actuality? In a case like this 
the more creative attitude is the truer since it is the realizer 
of greater possibilities. For truth, in any important and signi- 
ficant sense, must be distinguished from mere correctness by 
the criterion of utility. If you think you cannot jump the 
chasm, and, so thinking, you fall in, your previous judgment 
was correct, but it was not useful. Before the event the truth 
of the matter lay either in the chasm or on the other side. It 
is impossible to say that the truth was already established in 
either place. There was no absolute truth at the time, truth was 
being created by your act. And the tragedy of it is that you 
might have created a useful truth by your willingness to be- 
lieve in it. The possibility of falling was the alternative which 
should have been rejected; the other possibility was just as 
ready at hand. The real, in the sense of the important and 
relevant fact in the whole situation was the fact that you 
might succeed. To grasp such a potential truth and force 
its verification is a moral duty. 

It must be remembered that belief is an active assertion as 
to what shall be real for us. Psychologically it is a similar 
activity to that attention which in making one possibility more 
real than others actually brings new reality into being. Ex- 
perience in its active aspect is conscious experimentation. 
Believing is part of the whole selective process and it creates 
as it selects and holds. This is not true in all cases, of course, 
for the environment is not by any means entirely pliable, and 
the world cannot be molded to accord with all our desires. 
But within a restricted sphere, choice and creation do operate. 
And religious beliefs lie in this sphere. 

James always maintained that this position was compatible 
with the point of view of realism. The creation of reality 


96 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


through attention, for example, is not purely a subjective proc- 
ess. We do our part in the attending process. ‘‘ The rest is 
done by nature, which in some cases makes the objects real 
which we think of in this manner and in other cases does 
not.” ** And pragmatism is far from indifferent to the exist- 
ence of an external world of fact. ‘“‘ Pent in, as the pragmatist 
more than anyone else sees himself to be, between the whole 
body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coer- 
cions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels 
the immense pressure of objective control under which our 
minds perform their operations? If anyone imagines that this 
law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day, says 
Emerson.” *° 

And in a letter to Professor Dickinson S. Miller, dated 
August 5, 1907, James says, ‘‘I am a natural realist. The 
world per se may be likened to a cast of beans on a table. 
By themselves they spell nothing. An onlooker may group 
them as he likes. He may simply count them all and map 
them. He may select groups and name these capriciously, or 
name them to suit certain extrinsic purposes of his. Whatever 
he does, so long as he takes account of them, his account is 
neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it true? 
It fits the beans-minus-him and expresses the total fact, of 
beans-plus-him. Truth in this total sense is partially ambigu- 
ous then. If he simply counts or maps, he obeys a subjective 
interest as much as if he traces figures. Let that stand for 
pure “intellectual”? treatment of the beans, while grouping 
them variously stands for non-intellectual interests. All that 
Schiller and I contend for is that there is xo “ truth” without 
some interest, and that non-intellectual interests play a part 
as well as intellectual ones. Whereupon we are accused of 
denying the beans or denying being in any way constrained by 
them! It’s too silly! ” 1 


There is constraint enough, in the world of sense-percep- 
15 Principles of Psychology, 2: 320. 


16 Pragmatism, Pp. 233. 
17 Letters, 2: 295-6. 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 97 


tion, in that of “ intellection,” in the very rush of the biologi- 
cal process. But pragmatism focuses its attention on that por- 
tion of experience where problems and crises and decisions are 
real. These are the significant parts of life. And it is with 
these that truth itself has to do. So when James finds a man 
faced by an option, saying: I choose this course of action, but 
this is a practical decision, having to do with matters of con- 
duct and remote from the abstract world of truth, he pro- 
tests. Truth is what you are making here and now by this 
decision, he says. It is not something aloof from your daily 
interests. Truth is the most vital and practical thing we know. 
It grows up inside our finite experiences. Truth is a process. 
It is being made by our actions. It is not a prior static re- 
lationship, but zt 7s the success of our decisions and activities. 
This is merely taking the human activity-situation and 
saying that truth is in and of it. Truth had always been con- 
sidered valuable, but James saw that it did not degrade truth 
to say that it is the valuable, and the valuable is the true. And 
his constant defense against his critics is: What else can the 
truth be? If you say it is ‘‘ correspondence,” then where is the 
correspondence? What corresponds, and to what does it cor- 
respond? To say “to reality’ is too vague. Is there a pre- 
established world to which every detail of our lives must 
conform? To say so would be to deny the dramatic quality 
with which life seems to be invested. Novelty is real, new sit- 
uations come, and truth is implicit in them. Instead of calling 
them “merely ” practical let us realize that the problems of 
theory itself are set by practice. Consciousness is the middle 
term between sensation and reaction. It is grounded in prac- 
tical interest. < 
What shall we say, however, as to truth about the past? 
Here James’s theory strikes a difficulty. When an event has 
once occurred, we cannot unmake it or change it. On that 
reality we cannot, seemingly, exert creative influence. Nor do 
we appear to have much to do with the “ verification” of a 
truth about an event in history. When this criticism is made, 
by Dewey, Russell, Hawtrey and others, James resorts to the 


98 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


rather arbitrary procedure of distinguishing between the given- 
ness of a fact and the truth of a belief about the fact. To con- 
vert a fact, Caesar is dead, into a proposition, “‘ That Caesar 
is dead,” is to make room for all sorts of evasions, James says. 
Having done so, intellectualists are prone to confuse their 
belief that Caesar is dead with the fact, and so, James tells us, 
they try to make out a case for the “absolute” nature of 
their belief. 

James’s theory, however, is in essence a protest against the 
notion of irrelevant truth. Past events are past facts; truth 
should be concerned with things that are verifiable and rele- 
vant. And there is a sense in which James’s treatment even 
of past events is more objective than is that of his critics. We 
find a suggestion of it in his claim that the empiricist, unlike 
the absolutist, does not know certainly when truth is in his 
grasp, and is consequently unwilling to posit any truth as 
absolute and final. But this means that he leaves room for 
future verification even of past events. Does the empiricist 
then not appeal to a higher standard even than the absolutist? 
For the empiricist, verification is never complete, a higher 
verification is always possible. Truth itself advances with the 
novelty that keeps coming into the world. It seems possible 
to argue that James saw the nobler and more inclusive nature 
of this truth whose verification was never finished. The abso- 
lute is incomplete until it has become the Ultimate. 

But when all is said and done, the pragmatic theory does 
seem to be inadequate on the side of its treatment of events in 
the past. Of them it can only say that the truth of my belief 
about past events is susceptible of verification in so far as my 
future experiences may bring me into situations such that these 
past events have a bearing on my conduct. Yet this is of course 
to neglect an important part of the truth about the past. Prag- 
matism, being a forward-looking theory, neglects the past be- 
cause of its lack of interest in it. We live forward but we 
understand backward, Kierkegaard has said, and pragmatism, 
with its emphasis on the finding of truth in human living as 
much as in human understanding, directs its whole attention 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 99 


to fields of new discovery. This lack in pragmatism is, how- 
ever, a point in favor of our argument. Pragmatism’s in- 
terests and emphases are pre-eminently those of religious faith, 
its attitude is pre-eminently that of the will to believe. Belief, 
for pragmatism, is not belief about the past. That is unessen- 
tial and irrelevant. Pragmatism’s beliefs are postulates in the 
sense of Kant’s and Royce’s and Schiller’s postulates — for- 
ward-looking demands made upon the universe for the satis- 
faction of subjective needs, among which the moral and reli- 
gious needs are prominent. Pragmatism clearly has much more 
in common with the religious view, where the objects of belief 
must always remain unknowable, than with the scientific view 
where the correspondence relation may be the thing of chief 
importance. Religion will always require postulates, faith, the 
will to believe, and pragmatism’s fitness for this type of think- 
ing is significant evidence for the fundamental character of the 
religious strain in James’s philosophy. 

Criticisms of James’s whole point of view have been offered 
in abundance. And in the endeavor to meet them it seems to be 
necessary always to keep in mind James’s insistence that life 
and experience are richer than theories about them can possi- 
bly be. One critic, for example, makes much of the “ problem- 
atic ” attitude on which what James calls a passional decision 
is based. That a problematic attitude, so runs the argument, 
involves a theoretic judgment is agreed by logicians even when 
they differ as to the content of the theoretic judgment. For 
example, Sigwart claims that the problematic or hypothetical 
judgment, ‘‘ A may be B,” contains a theoretic assertion as to 
the uncertainty of the A-B relation, while Windelband says 
that the theoretic judgment is a negative one, the denial that 
anything is known definitely about the A-B relation. In either 
case, when James asserts: This belief may be true, let us affirm 
it and make it true, he is really involved in a theoretic judg- 
ment which must vitiate his whole procedure. 

But in the light of the pragmatic theory of life and of truth 
this argument does not carry much weight. The judgment “A 
may be B ” can be said to involve a theoretic judgment in the 


100 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


sense that from any human situation certain features may be 
singled out and a theoretic judgment made concerning them. 
But pragmatism sees life as a more complex affair than a 
succession of theoretic judgments. Because life is more than 
theory, because ‘‘ reality overflows logic,”’ certain occasions do 
come for which our theoretic knowledge is inadequate. In such 
cases our activity cannot wait for our knowledge, because our 
knowledge is incomplete. Decide we must, for even vacilla- 
tion is one kind of decision. And pragmatism can affirm that 
this is not acting in a manner unworthy of the truth because 
of its view that truth is dynamic and “ grows up inside our 
finite experiences.” Logical statements of insufficient evidence 
are not the whole of life. The Kingdom of Heaven cometh 
not by syllogisms. 

The same critic and others have maintained that there are 
really no “ forced options.” The possibility of doubting and 
continuing to inquire is still open. But the reply is of course 
that doubt is itself one alternative of a forced option. As 
James shows in the Principles of Psychology, the opposite of 
belief is not disbelief but doubt. And as he shows in The Will 
to Believe, the religious question usually presents itself not so 
much as a choice between faith and atheism as between faith 
and skepticism. Doubt cuts us off from the privileges of be- 
lief as surely as a negative decision does. And James’s argu- 
ment is simply that when such a forced option comes we are 
justified in accepting the immediate evidences which the posi- 
tive alternative brings and need not feel compelled to go grub- 
bing through logical processes for mediate ones which can be 
no more satisfactory if indeed they are even found. The vi- 
sion has its claims upon us as well as the argument. “ The 
essence of the whole experience, when the individual swept 
through it says finally ‘I believe,’ is the intense concreteness 
of his vision.” ** 

Another criticism maintains that it is inaccurate to say that 
in any sense belief or faith creates its own verification. If we 
are bailing out a leaky boat, we succeed not because of the 


18 The Meaning of Truth, p. 258. 


OF WILLIAM AMES IOI 


truth of our belief, but because of the effectiveness of our bail- 
ing. But James’s theory, as we have abundantly seen, is in the 
first place a protest against the notion that the truth of the 
success or failure is established already. We make the truth 
along with our faith and effort. In the second place, psycholog- 
ically it can hardly be denied that belief in success is a stimu- 
lus to greater effort. To say that the truth causes the success 
sounds like an intellectualist’s account of truth as already or- 
dained in the nature of things. But to say that the belief 
brings about the success is to talk not like an intellectualist 
but like a psychologist. In the third place, this example brings 
out one of pragmatism’s chief claims to advantage. Its theories 
are pertinent to just such situations as these; it has a mes- 
sage for the difficult and crucial places in life, the message of 
courage. 

The appeal to courage is one of the greatest assets of 
James’s whole argument. Undoubtedly our intellectual life has 
too often been regarded as wholly passive, a process of meas- 
uring and conforming after the fact. Its adventurous and 
creative aspect has been understood well enough by those who 
have engaged in the intellectual life for themselves, but others 
have been slow in realizing it. This is reflected far too clearly 
in our educational process, which is often regarded by the 
student as a process of absorption rather than creation. 
James’s pragmatic emphasis brings out the mistakenness of 
this point of view and also brings out the peculiarly creative 
part which thought plays when it is directed toward the sub- 
ject of religion. Aside from its experiential aspect religion 
seems to afford an especially good example of the will to 
realize value. Much of our thought life, historical, scientific, 
analytical, is concerned with the world of description. Our 
passion for unity and continuity, well enough in itself as an 
aid in classifying, is apt to lead us to the view that the world 
of fact and the world of interpretation are one and continuous. 
It requires creative effort and imagination to see that they 
are not. The science of anthropology may give us the facts 
of the origin of religion but it cannot dictate or throw light 


102 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


on the question of the values of religion. These values exist 
in potentiality, ready to be created by our recognition of them. 
But to recognize them we must have energy and courage. 
Our recognition must include a definitely creative factor. In 
his famous essay on “‘ Axioms as Postulates”’ Professor F. C. S. 
Schiller insists that, in large measure, our perceptions de- 
pend upon what we come prepared to receive, and that in re- 
ligion one can go further than this, for “ nothing is more rea- 
sonable than to suppose that if there be anything personal at 
the bottom of things, the way we behave to it must affect the 
way it behaves to us.” *° 

So in religious faith the courageously creative factor in the 
intellectual process attains its highest degree of worth. For 
faith means analysis of and discrimination between values, but 
it also means thorough-going insistence that values shall exist 
even at the heart of the universe. Faith is a postulation, a 
demand that the universe itself recognize the eternal worth- 
whileness of the moral quality of every-day life. This is what 
is meant by the comparison often made of faith and courage. 
In an epigram of Professor Kirsopp Lake’s, “ Faith is not be- 
lief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequence.” *° 
In James’s words: “Faith means belief in something con- 
cerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the 
test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is 
the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which 
is not certified to us in advance. It is the same moral quality 
which we call courage in practical affairs.” °** And “if reli- 
gious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the 
active faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing them- 
selves in life, are the experimental tests by which they are 
verified, and the only means by which their truth or false- 
hood can be wrought out.” *° 

So it is in religious faith that we have the most clear-cut 
example of the worth of the creative factor in the situation 


19 Personal Idealism, p. 63. 

20 Landmarks of Early Christianity, p. 74. 
21 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 90. 

22 [bid.,p. xil, 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 103 


out of which that relation which we call truth arises. And in 
the series of essays published with ‘‘ The Will to Believe” 
and written, as James tells us in the preface, in defense of re- 
ligious faith we have a clear anticipation of the distinctive 
elements in James’s later theory of truth. In these essays 
James brought together several ideas which found expression 
in the Principles of Psychology and in some of the earlier re- 
views and essays, such as the practical function of conscious- 
ness, the interdependence of the thinking, willing, and feeling 
processes, the purposive nature of all human activity, the psy- 
chological kinship of belief and volition, and combined with 
them an emphasis on the need for postulates or the importance 
of passional decisions, the unavoidableness of risk, and the 
notion of verification as a process awaiting completion in the 
future. These are all important ideas in James’s pragmatic 
philosophy, and it is instructive to notice that we find them 
assembled here in defense of religious faith. 

The threads of our argument here begin to come together. 
James, we see, had to solve his conflict in favor of pluralism 
to be consistent with the thought of the will to believe. Yet 
the conflict was a real one, for monism appealed on the very 
subjectivistic and pragmatic grounds we have been outlining, 
especially as they merged in the demand for religious well- 
being. But the problem of freedom is also a crucial one. It 
must be solved in a way such that the experienced reality of 
the moral struggle will not be denied. And freedom holds in 
the world of belief as in that of action. ‘The Will to Be- 
lieve” is the point of clarification and crystallization of 
James’s pragmatic theory. And as the main lines of his 
thought converge here for clearer definition, so do they 
broaden later into a more inclusive view, in which the at- 
tributes of religious faith are seen to be in greater or less 
measure applicable to the problem of truth in general. 


VI 
THE PURPOSIVE WILL: VALUES AND TELEOLOGY 


UR study so far has brought out the central position 
which values occupy in James’s philosophy. Life, as 
James conceived it, is full of valuable and desirable 
things, and its aim is to bring to pass as many of these as pos- 
sible. These values are empirical, that is, they are found in ex- 
perience and tested by experience. They arise out of human de- 
sires and are justified in the fact that they fill human needs. 
This is sufficient authority, it is indeed the highest possible 
authority, for there can be no a priori or transcendental justi- 
fication. Truth is a relation in which the element of value is 
important. Its authority, like that of values themselves, rests 
on its pertinence to human situations. In fact, truth may al- 
most be called a corollary of value. If a belief or idea is 
valuable it is true “so far forth.” Truth has to do with the 
“relevant,” the “meaningful,” the ‘important.’ James’s 
whole philosophy may indeed be described as centering in the 
notion of the humanly significant. 

Since Plato, at least, all philosophers have been interested 
in values, but not all have stressed, as does James, the human 
origin of values and their empirical criteria. Nor do all phi- 
losophers make these immediately experienced values and their 
postulated criteria the basis on which to build a theory of the 
nature of truth and its relation to human living. Many mod- 
ern philosophers of religion in their insistence on the reality 
of a world of interpretation as contrasted with the scientific 
world of description seem to be taking their cue from Kant 
and his theory of the primacy of the practical reason. The 


104 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 105 


world in which we live and work and envisage better things 
must provide an environment for the values for which the 
spirit yearns. Let values live though the heavens fall. Our 
faith in the reality of moral and spiritual worths is as justifi- 
able and its objects as sure as any factual data which science 
can discover. So reasons much of modern religious thought, 
going Kant one better in its attempt to stress the autonomy 
of the world of ideals. 

Ritschl, in his Justification and Reconciliation, was one of 
the first to bring out the importance for religion of the value- 
judgment. According to him both philosophy and religion 
make use of value-judgments, but their use by religion is more 
consistent than their use by philosophy. For philosophy pro- 
fesses complete disinterestedness, while religion acknowledges 
a supreme interest in values from the beginning.’ This ab- 
sorption by religion in the concerns of value is emphasized by 
modern writers on religion like Hoffding, W. K. Wright, and 
the late Professor G. B. Foster who make religion consist in 
the faith that there is an integral connection between fact and 
value, and the belief that lasting values can be achieved. A 
spirited defense of religion as bound up with our understand- 
ing of values is made from the idealistic position in the final 
chapter of Professor R. A. Tsanoff’s recently published book, 
The Problem of Immortality. Professor W. D. Sorley in his 
Moral Values and the Idea of God argues from the possibility 
of finite error in moral judgments to the existence of a trans- 
cendent standard, a Supreme Worth, which is God. 

James starts, however, not from the possibility of error in 
judgments of value, but rather from the possibility of suc- 
cess in the value-attaining process. Values are dependent on 
human interests. A thing is valuable in so far as it is desired 
by some sentient being. Is this to say that values are sub- 
jective? Yes, in a sense, but not in a bad sense. For in the 
first place to affirm that values are relative to and dependent 
on our interests is not to say that they are dependent on our 
Opinion about them. The interest and the consequent value 


1 P, 210, Eng. tr. 


106 . RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


are empirical facts. The judgment may not be a judgment of 
fact at all, it may be an error. We must distinguish carefully 
between desire itself and judgment concerning desirability. 
The desire is subjective in the sense that an individual finds 
it emanating from himself, but objective in the sense that it 
is an empirical datum. Again, it must be remembered that in 
James’s philosophy the opposition between value and fact is 
beginning to break down, since facts themselves are known 
only by a process in which the valuing element is prominent, 
a process of selective attention taking notice of those facts 
which fall in line with its interests. Every fact is in a sense a 
judged fact, and into any judgment of fact the evaluating 
element enters. When we remember James’s distinction be- 
tween fact and truth it is not difficult to see how far from be- 
ing a term of reproach “ subjective ” is when applied to value. 
Truth is a relation between mind and fact which brings out 
the significance of the fact. Truth and value join hands in 
their essential quality of significance for human life. 

Values then, are subjective in the sense that they are per- 
sonal. They are, in the second place, individual rather than 
social. Royce once said that the greatest difference between 
his religious philosophy and that of James lay in his emphasis 
on the social aspect, as contrasted with James’s individualistic 
interest. Not that James was blind to the demands made upon 
the individual by society. The ultimate goal of all activity is — 
the good of the greatest number of individuals. “‘ There is but 
one unconditional commandment,’ James wrote in ‘ The 
Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” “ which is that we 
should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and 
act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good 
which we can see.”’ And in a more concrete sense, James had 
emphatically what would be called a “social outlook.” We 
have commented before on his activity in behalf of the Philip- 
pine Islanders, as well as on his democratic instincts. “On a 
Certain Blindness in Human Beings” is an eloquent appeal 
for tolerance of other ideals and ideas and for non-inter- 
ference with other lives. In the essay on “ What Makes a 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 107 


Life Significant ” he remarks that he sometimes thinks “ not 
to our generals and poets, but to the Italian and Hungarian 
laborers in the Subway, ought monuments of gratitude and 
reverence to be raised.”’ From Europe he writes to his wife in 
glowing terms of the unobtrusive and unappreciated virtues 
so widely prevalent in peasant life. And as for his attitude 
toward those of his own circle of acquaintance, no one can 
read the two volumes of published letters without realizing 
how true and warm a friend he must have been, and how 
largely the welfare of his friends determined his own hap- 
piness. 

Yet it remains true that in his religion, as in his philosophy, | 
it is the individualistic note that is struck. James does not 
share the interest of the French school of sociologists or even 
of his fellow partisans the Chicago pragmatists, in the social 
origin and sociological significance of religion. Social cere- 
monies are hardly mentioned in all the twenty lectures which 
make up the volume on Varieties of Religious Experience. 
Mysticism is treated not as a precipitation of ideas gained 
from the social milieu, but as the point at which the individ- 
ual’s vision brings its own authority. Similarly James does not 
have Rauschenbusch’s interest in formulating a theology for 
the social gospel any more than he catches Royce’s vision of 
the Beloved Community. His is not primarily a gospel of 
social righteousness or of service. Both follow from his theory, 
but they follow implicitly. They are not James’s point of ap- 
proach or his final goal. His writings in this respect furnish a 
refreshing contrast to the prevalent over-emphasis on the social 
origin and social values and functions of religion. 

In his entire theory of values James is consistently indi- 
vidualistic. What is the purpose of a college education? he 
asks in the essay on “ The Social Value of the College-Bred.” ” 
It is to help you to know a good man when you see him! 
Our colleges should teach biographical history. Perhaps it is 
James’s early artistic training which makes its influence felt 
here, for just as the greatest art finds universal qualities in 


2 Memories and Studies, pp. 300 ff. 


108 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


the individual, so James seems to discover universal values in 
the whole-hearted aspirations of the human individual spirit. 
College should teach us, he says, what it is that makes a 
superior individual superior: “‘ The feeling for a good human 
job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable. . 
this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal 
values. . . . Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting 
relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for medi- 
ocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks.” 

And seeing in what superiority consists we should strive to 
attain it for ourselves. More abundant living, on the part of 
each man and woman,—that is James’s ideal for us. The 
satisfaction of the greatest number of desires of the greatest 
number of individuals is the goal. Let each individual make 
life as rich and complete as he can, let him satisfy as many 
of his own ideals as possible, always remembering the other 
-person’s freedom to determine his own ideals for himself. For 
“neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed 
to any one observer.” 

Values are thus linked with personality as it expresses it- 
self in individualistic and distinctive desires and purposes. An- 
_ other requirement of values is that they shall fill the needs 
of the whole man rather than those of the theoretic conscious- 
ness exclusively. Consciousness itself functions, as we have 
seen in detail, for the sake of ends that are set by our prac- 
tical and emotional nature. In Goethe’s words, which James 
often quoted: 


* Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie 
Und griin des Lebens goldner Baum.” 


The nature of values may be further explained by noticing 
how the interested, purposeful individual not merely finds 
them, but brings them into being. In a previous chapter it 
was observed that we invest with reality the objects to which 
we attend. To this statement must now be added another, that 
our attention, itself determined by emotional and volitional 
interests, has the power to invest its object with value. If we 
were ourselves devoid of interest, and viewed the world with 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 109 


a complete absence of emotion, we should find the world it- 
self to be empty of value. “ Significance ” and “ importance ” 
would then be meaningless terms. So we may say that ‘“‘ What- 
ever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may 
appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’s 
mind.” * Here is summed up at once the subjective, individual, 
and emotional-volitional character of value. Or, to take a dif- 
ferent context, Walt Whitman’s ecstasy may seem absurd, 
says James, ‘‘ yet in what other kind of value can the precious- 
ness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if 
it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, en- 
gendered in some one, by what the hour contains? ”’ + 

These experiences of “‘ excited significance” seem to have 
come most often for James when the element of aggressiveness 
was present. When the active part of man’s nature is work- 
ing effectively, when it is strongly aroused by a combative or 
recalcitrant element in the experiential material which must 
be bent to its purpose, then life takes on zest and meaning. 
The ideal must be there, but it must be coupled with effort. 
This is divertingly illustrated in a letter to Mrs. James written 
after he had attended a Chautauqua conference. Such a “ mid- 
dle class Paradise”? was too lacking in vigor to hold his 
enthusiasm: ‘‘ Now for Utica and Lake Placid by rail, with 
East Hill in prospect for tomorrow. You bet I rejoice at the 
outlook — I long to escape from tepidity. Even an Armenian 
massacre, whether to be killer or killed, would seem an agree- 
able change from the blamelessness of Chautauqua as she 
lies soaking year after year in her lakeside sun and showers. 
Man wants to be stretched to_his utmost, if not in one way 
then in another.” ° 

To mention strain and effort is to suggest moral values and 
their place in the scheme. The first question which occurs is: 
What is their origin? This subject James takes up in the final 
chapter of the Principles of Psychology but he does not find 
an answer which entirely satisfies him. The last paragraph of 


3 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 150. 
4 Talks to Teachers, p. 247. 
S> Letiers,\2?) 43. 


i 


110 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


the book leaves the question undecided. However, if we do 
not know whence moral ideals came, we do at least know 
something about the manner of their coming. They seem to 
correspond to changes of brain structure which in turn have 
come as spontaneous variations. Certainly some of them have 
nothing to do with immediate utility. But like our sensitive- 
ness to the charm of a sequence of sounds or of a design or 
of an arrangement of colors, many of our ideals seem to have 
arisen from certain inborn feelings for the fitness of things, 
which themselves are inexplicable except as variations of 
organic structure. 

This is true alike of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic ideals. 
We are inclined to think of the desire for scientific accuracy 
as something which the race has always possessed; but actu- 
ally, ‘‘ few even of the cultivated members of the race have 
shared it; it was invented but a few centuries ago.”* But 
with the intellectual ideal once established, the ‘subjective 
need for uniformity’ or the felt necessity for relating and 
classifying, we find that the environment lends itself to its 
requirements more readily than it does to aesthetic or moral 
needs. Science finds its postulates justified fairly readily, much 
more readily than are those of art, and still more than those 
of morality. The external order does not yield easily to the 
demands of our moral nature. When it does yield, our moral 
postulate becomes a moral proposition, but accepted proposi- 
tions of ethics are today even less in number than those of 
aesthetics, as the latter are less than those of science. 

The account of the origin of these ideals given by the as- 
sociationist school in psychology is correct to a certain extent. 
Some of them are determined entirely by habitual associa- 
tion with ideas of pleasure and pain. But just as clearly 
others are independent of habit or of immediately felt utility, 
and these we can only refer to spontaneous physiological vari- 
ations in ourselves. In the intellectual realm we accept much 
as a matter of experience — that fire burns, that motion is 
communicated from one object to another, etc. But the ulti- 


8 Principles, 2: 640 n. 


———ee rrr CtS—C~—C~—S 


OF WILLIAM FAMES III 


mate postulate of the rational mind, that the universe must 
be through and through intelligible, is not a product of any ex- 
perienced effects. Similarly in the moral realm the individual 
takes his own rights as a matter of course, but the more subtle 
details of social ethics are not explicable so easily. ‘‘ They 
present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past ex- 
perience than in that of probable causes of future experience, 
factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far 
taught us must learn to bend.” * 

The question of origins, however, is not the most important 
question of ethics. James is throughout consistent with the 
standard which in the Varieties he sets up for the study of 
religion. Not by their roots, but by their fruits, ye shall know 
them. The question of how obligation arises must defer to 
the question of its practical meaning for us. Moral and other 
values, as we have seen, do not exist except in a world of 
sentient beings. In a universe constituted merely of physical 
and chemical elements it is impossible to say that one state 
of affairs is better than another. But as soon as even one 
sentient being is introduced, a standard of value enters. 
“Good ” and “bad” now have meaning, for any thing or 
event may further the interests of this being. In so far as any 
phenomenon does so, it is absolutely good. Any conflict has 
to do simply with the interests of this being, there is no 
standard external to him. Of the various ideals with which 
he is confronted, some “ will no doubt be more pungent and 
appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a profounder, 
more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him with 
more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have 
to order his life with them as its chief determinants, or else 
remain inwardly discordant and unhappy.” * 

This inward lack of concord is all that immorality means 
so far, but the situation is greatly complicated if another per- 
son or a number of persons be introduced. Then we should 
have as many worlds as persons, each with its demands gradu- 
ally becoming internally unified and developing its own indi- 


7 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 189. 8 [bid., p. 191. 


112 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


vidual ideas of truth and value, but with as yet no common 
criteria. There is a great deal of goodness in the world thus 
described because there are many desires and demands. The 
method of determining betterness is not so clear. But James 
sticks to his guns. Nothing is good except as some conscious- 
ness feels it to be good, and there is no obligation except as 
some personality makes a claim. The converse is true as well. 
Obligation is felt only where there is a claim, and wherever 
there is a claim there is an obligation. There is nothing exter- 
nal to our human wants which swoops down and infuses them 
with validity. Our wants carry their own obligation. ‘ Take 
any demand, however slight, which any creature, however 
weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be 
satisfied? If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of 
proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another 
creature who should make a demand that ran the other way. 
The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon 
ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. 
Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes 
itself valid by the fact that it exists at all.” ° 

What a confusion! is our first reaction. Desires everywhere 
making claims, yet no way of telling which claim has pre- 
cedence. But just here the religious view shows its superior- 
ity. For religion postulates demands which are both personal 
and authoritative. The claims which God makes are as genu- 
inely personal as any claims can be and at the same time more 
compelling than anything human. So a man who believes in 
the existence of a great universal consciousness and who be- 
lieves he knows the desires of this consciousness has a sure 
standard of moral values. But he must not appeal over the 
head of the Deity to any a priori ethic, any transcendental 
Reason or Justice. And even his recognition of the divine will 
must be kept concrete. It is not abstractly right that he should 
respect God’s commands. God’s own standard of right must 
find confirmation in the believer’s desires before it is final for 
him. 

So personal desires determine values. With a true scientific, 

® Jbid., p. 195. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 113 


realistic interest in the concrete, James regards human interests | 
the surest things we know and the most satisfactory deter- 
minants of whatever values there may be in life. And where 
human desires fail to provide a satisfactory standard there is 
always the tempting possibility of bringing in divine desires 
to fill the gap. The religious conflict which has taken so much 
of our attention was itself a conflict between claims arising 
from conflicting desires. The problem of the absolute James 
settled on the basis of comparative values. And conversely 
the problem of absolutism seems to have helped him to a 
theory of value. Ever and again in his writings we find evi- 
dence that the question of absolutism was lurking in James’s 
mind and influencing his decisions. He adopts a radical notion 
of truth largely because he cannot allow himself to be com- 
mitted to an absolutistic, static universe. And similarly his 
aversion for the determined and the compulsory seems to have 
had a part in his decision for a theory of value in which man 
plays a creative rdle. 

A characteristic touch is found in James’s statement that the 
postulation of God is not necessary to give validity to the 
ethical claim. For himself it is the most satisfactory method 
but he does not wish to force his method on others. It is neces- 
sary that the belief in God should not be necessary. The one 
thing we must not accept is compulsion in our beliefs or in 
our actions. Whether or not God exist, human life affords a 
basis for an ethical code. The only question is whether the 
philosopher’s demand for ethical stability is adequately met in 
a system which leaves religion out. But since human life does 
afford such a basis there must be some strictly human method 
of distinguishing what is truly good. “‘ The best, on the whole, 
of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be the 
capacity to bring happiness. But in order not to break down 
fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and 
impulses that never aim at happiness; so that, after all, in 
seeking for a universal principle we inevitably are carried 
onward to the most universal principle —that the essence of 
good is simply to satisfy demand.” *° 

10 Jbid., p. 201. 


114 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


Yet even this brings out the tentative character of ethical 
theory. Which demands are satisfied in truly lasting and ef- 
fective fashion? In the chapter on Mysticism we shall take up 
one possible way of answering the question. Here let us notice 
that in the essay on ‘‘ The Moral Philosopher and the Moral 
Life,” which has furnished the material for the present discus- 
sion, James definitely gives evidence of the longing which we 
have noticed in him before for that peace of finality which 
transcends all experimentation. “ It would seem, too, — and 
this is my final conclusion — that the stable and systematic 
moral universe for which the ethical philosopher asks is pos- 
sible only in a world where there is a divine thinker with all- 
enveloping demands. If such a thinker existed, his way of 
subordinating the demands to one another would be the 
finally valid casuistic scale; his claims would be the most 
appealing; his ideal universe would be the most inclusive 
realizable whole. If he now exist, then actualized in his 
thought already must be that ethical philosophy which we 
seek as the pattern which our own must evermore approach. 
In the interests of our own ideal of systematically unified 
moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, must 
postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the validity of the 
religious cause.” ** 

Religion thus satisfies the need for final authority but the 
conflicting need is ever present. Even in this essay the part 
that it also plays in calling up the strenuous mood is em- 
phasized. In religion “ the more imperative ideals . . . begin to 
speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and 
to utter the penetrating, shattering, tragically challenging note 
of appeal. They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo’s alpine 
eagle, ‘ qui parle au précipice et que le gouffre entend,’ and the 
strenuous mood awakens at the sound. . . . The capacity of 
the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural 
human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or 
traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postu- 
late one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of 


11 p, 214. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES IIS 


the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest... . 
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity 
for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have reli- 
gious faith. For this reason the strenuous type of character 
will on the battle-field of human history always outwear the 
easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the 
wall.” 

This stirring passage should be convincing on the score 
that moral values reach their consummation in a religious 
environment just as the philosophic demand for a unified 
ethical theory is most easily satisfied on a religious basis. 
From whatever angle we view it, morality points to religion. 
Deeply intrenched as is James’s scientifically realistic urge, 
just as deep is the impulse to peer out beyond the world of 
phenomena to find a transcendent reality which shall give 
human values the highest kind of validity. 

A teleological view of human life finds its completion in re- 
ligion in a similar way. Like his ethics, James’s teleology has 
a psychological basis, and starts by stressing the volitional 
nature of human activity. It appears early in his writings, 
notably in his ‘‘ Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind 
as Correspondence,” first published in 1878 and now reprinted 
in Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 43 ff., where the pur- 
posive character of thought is clearly stated. Human interests 
and desires, one discovers in this article, are not only the deter- 
minants of our ethics, they furnish both the power and the 
direction for our thinking. Thought is carried on for the bene- 
fit of specific interests. All intellectual activity is definitely 
purposive. James’s teleology, that is to say, is not the kind 
which has reference to a universal, cosmic plan which the 
whole creation travaileth together to achieve. It is not the 
Platonic or Leibnitzian variety, but one allied in some respects 
to that of vitalism.. It is not like the “ radical finalism ” which 
Bergson repudiates ** but bears resemblance to the élan vital 
which he postulates. Or, using Professor McDougall’s ter- 


tae Pats: 
13 Creative Evolution, p. 39. 


116 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


minology, it is a kind of “ hormic ” theory.* James has him- 
self hinted at the difference in a letter to N. S. Shaler.” 

Teleology as expressed in the Principles of Psychology 
makes consciousness an organ functioning for the sake of 
emotional and volitional needs. Mental activity is a means 
to practical adjustment. Pragmatism recognizes anew the im- 
portance of this practical adjustment and makes it a criterion 
of the correctness, that is, the success, of mental activity. 
The teleological view finds in the practical differences made 
by consciousness the fulfillment of the organism’s purpose. 
Pragmatism finds in them a clue to the meaning of truth as 
well. Truth itself resides in the satisfaction of those interests 
which consciousness, following its volitional leading, says must 
be satisfied. 

In the essay on “ Reflex Action and Theism” James uses 
his teleological theory in the interests of religion. The reflex 
theory of mental action, he says, the theory that all intellec- 
tual activity is a middle term between the incoming currents 
of sensation and the outward active discharges from the nerv- 
ous centres, forces us to regard the mind as a teleological 
mechanism. The middle department, the theorizing part of 
the mind, functions in the interest of what James calls our 
emotional and practical subjectivity. Our minds receive a 
sense impression, define it, decide on a course of action, and 
then react. But the defining and deciding are carried on for 
the sake of the action, they are purposeful. And when the 
object that confronts us is not an individual sense-object but 
the whole of experience, when we are forced, that is, to de- 
cide on our attitude toward life and its values, then again our 
decision is made for and known in terms of its practical con- 
sequences. I may refuse to decide or may decide that “ All 
is vanity,” but the consequences are significant in any case. 

A decision as to the universe, then, like a decision as to 
anything else, must satisfy each of the three departments of 
the mind. It must not contradict what we learn through the 
senses, it must not be internally inconsistent, or conflict with 


14 Outline of Psychology, p. 71. 15 Letters, 2: 154. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 117 


other mental conceptions, and finally it must be consonant 
with our active impulses. This last requirement, thinks James, 
is the one that needs the most emphasis. And in it is found 
one of our surest leadings towards a theistic decision. The 
solutions to the riddle of the universe which are offered by 
materialism and agnosticism are wholly out of accord with 
our active demands. Our volitional nature demands some- 
thing to do. But what? Remain in ignorance and act on the 
hypothesis that you don’t know, says agnosticism. React to 
atoms, says materialism. But how can this satisfy our active 
needs? Theism, however, “ always stands ready with the most 
practically rational solution it is possible to conceive. Not an 
energy of our active nature to which it does not authoritatively 
appeal, not an emotion of which it does not normally and 
naturally release the springs. At a single stroke, it changes 
the dead blank zt of the world into a living thou, with whom 
the whole man may have dealings. . . . Our volitional nature 
must then, until the end of time, exert a constant pressure 
upon the other departments of the mind to induce them to 
function to a theistic conclusion.” ** Anything short of a theistic 
view therefore will always be irrational, using the word ra- 
tional, as James always does use it, to mean satisfactory to 
the whole nature of man. Theism, in making the universe per- 
sonal, makes possible vigorous and satisfactory action. Like 
pluralism it gives a man “something to worship and fight 
for.” 

But if anything which falls short of theism is irrational, 
anything which goes beyond theism is impossible. We may 
change the ‘it ” of the universe into a “ thou,” but we are 
not justified in turning the “thou” into a “me.” To do so 
is to follow the gnostic tendency to bridge the gap between 
subject and object, as in the Hegelian system. An unwar- 
ranted and undesirable monism is the result. The fact that 
James could not tolerate a conceptual identity of Deity and 
devotee must not be construed, however, as a rejection of the 
possibility of mystical union. Theistic mysticism, he says, 

16 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 127. 


118 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


does not try to transcend the dualism of worshipper and Ob- 
ject of worship; it simply is not interested in speculating on 
whether there is a dualism or not. The mystic (or the theist) 
decides that a religious reaction to the world is appropriate, 
‘and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul. His in- 
sight into the what of life leads to results so immediately and 
intimately rational that the why, the how and the whence of 
it are questions that lose all urgency. . . . Happiness over the 
fact that being has made itself what it is, evacuates all specula- 
tion as to how it could make itself at all.” *” Thus if we accept 
the teleological view of human life which James thinks psy- 
chology forces us to accept, we are led inevitably to theism. 
Anything less than theism is irrational, anything greater is 
impossible. Again philosophy finds its completion in religion. 
The more one studies James the more vivid becomes the 
impression of the keenness and liveliness of his sense for value. 
He was awake, as only the most gifted spirits are, to the rich- 
ness and beauty and worth-whileness of life, and one of his 
outstanding characteristics was his ability to find desirable 
and noteworthy objects in the most surprising and out-of-the- 
way places. He had a full share of those “ piercing intui- 
tions”? which in one passage he mentions as necessary for 
the discernment that makes possible the good life. The more 
intimate of his letters fairly breathe this quality, and it is 
found to a marked degree in the talks to students and in the 
biographical sketches published in Memories and Studies. 
The conflict between this eager, appreciative type of mind 
intent after realizable values and insistent that these values 
may justifiably be taken as an index of ultimate reality, and 
the other type which prides itself on its purer, in the sense of 
more disinterested, intellectualism has been commented on 
before. James, as we have seen, has been taken to task by a 
host of critics for his supposed failure to recognize that the 
student should aim to envisage the truth as it is in itself rather 
than as he wishes it to be. This criticism is made with pe- 
culiar force by Professor Santayana in his brilliant essay in 


17 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 136. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 119 


Character and Opinion in the United States. ‘‘ James,” he 
says,’* “ fell in with the hortatory tradition of college sages; 
he turned his psychology, whenever he could do so honestly, 
to purposes of edification. . . . He seems to have felt sure 
that certain thoughts and hopes — those familiar to a liberal 
Protestantism — were every man’s true friends in life... . 
But what is a good life? Had William James, had the people 
about him, had modern philosophers anywhere, any notion of 
that? I cannot think so. They had much experience of per- 
sonal goodness . . . but as to what might render human exist- 
ence good, excellent, beautiful, happy, and worth having as a 
whole, their notions were utterly thin and barbarous.” 

A touch of severity, this, which seems hardly called for. In 
the first place, James’s outlook was clearly not limited by 
Protestantism any more than it was by the point of view of 
any other confession. In the second place, not merely as a 
doer, but also as a discoverer of what is good, he seems to 
have established a place in the minds of thousands of his 
readers. It is true that James was, to use Matthew Arnold’s 
terms, as much of a Hebraist as he was a Hellenist. A seeker 
after truth he was indeed, but one who found both value and 
indications as to truth in the doing of the immediate task. 
The good life is not discovered merely by speculating con- 
cerning it. Thought and speculation there must be, most as- 
suredly, but meanwhile there are tasks to be done, friendly 
services to be performed, beautiful things to be appreciated. 
Life includes all these things, and the good life is the one 
which is more richly endowed with them than any other. 
And if we say that life offers us these things must we add 
that in doing so it breaks with truth? Is not even truth made 
up of elements which the active life brings and joins to the 
contemplative? Ideas themselves are, psychologically speak- 
ing, in large part the product of motor reactions. Conscious- 
ness is impulsive. And truth is dynamic, individual, and in 
part, perhaps the most important part, being created by 
human effort. 


18 P. 84. 


120 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


The criticism of James’s right to turn his psychology “to 
. purposes of edification ” seems to rest on the supposition that 
he should not have tried to edify unless he had an assurance 
which neither he nor any other human being can hope to have 
as to the final adequacy of his premises. Instead of comment- 
ing on this rather remarkable assumption that science is never 
justified in pointing a moral, one may indicate the extraordi- 
nary response which James evoked by his use of psychology 
for moral admonition. His chapters on “Habit” and on 
“Will” are recognized as remarkable for their ethical in- 
sight. The former has been published separately, and widely 
used for ethical instruction. It seems a trifle far-fetched to 
claim that its ‘hortatory” and “ edifying” qualities per se 
interfere with its scientific standing. Is it not rather the case 
that its ability to meet the needs of so many persons is an 
evidence of its claim on the truth? It may be the fact in 
actual experience that the preacher often does not share the 
investigator’s clear vision of reality. But if so, he fails not 
because he is a preacher but simply because he is not an in- 
_ vestigator as well. And the most adequate research worker 
in the field of ethics and religion would seem to be the one 
who has the most complete vision and the broadest sympa- 
thies, who understands the practical implications for human 
living of his scientific vision and uses that understanding to 
arrive at the most complete, most synthetic truth. James has 
done just this. And it is noteworthy that his use of the evidence 
of value and purpose in human life to suggest the nature of 
ultimate reality pointed the path which is today being followed 
in many of our contemporary attempts to bring science and re- 
ligion closer together.1® James’s description of human life in 
its cosmic environment in terms of will and purpose is a moral 
and spiritual tonic, and may be trusted to make its appeal to 
readers as a true account as long as men think of experience 
in terms of effort and combat. 


19 Cf. the arguments of Dean Shailer Mathews in Contributions of 
Science to Religion and of Professor Arthur Thomson in his Science and 
Religion. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 121 


James’s whole philosophy may thus be described in terms 
of its insistence on the reality of human values in themselves 
as defined by human desires and purposes, and on the right 
to consider them as indices of whatever higher realms of be- 
ing may exist. The real is the rational, truly enough, but the 
rational must include the humanly desirable. No definition 
which leaves this out is thinkable. And the humanly desir- 
able can be brought into existence if our will be sufficiently 
strong. In religion we are dealing with the realm in which 
what ought to be can, with certain limitations, be identified 
with what és. 

In concluding this chapter let us once more notice the im- 
portant supplementary part which religion plays in James’s 
theory of values. Whether there be a God or not, moral values 
endure. Yet James seems hardly to have arrived at a satisfac- 
tory human standard for appraising them. Utility, pungency, 
lasting quality, —these are not easy to apply. If, however, 
we can believe in a God, a clear and authoritative stand- 
ard appears. And the presence of a God not only satisfies our 
desire for finality, it makes the values themselves more com- 
pelling. Finally, it is in the religious realm, if anywhere, that 
we begin to see how value can be identified with validity. For 
here we are dealing with postulates and creative hypotheses. 
The active will in its freedom and its purposefulness asserts 
its right to believe and in so doing creates the appropriate 
conditions for the operation of the objects of its belief. To 
two of its beliefs, in God and in immortality, we must now 
turn. 


VII 


THE DEITY 
NY author is easy,” said James, “if you catch the 

centre of his vision.” From it his ideas radiate and 

in it the main lines of his thought converge. Nearly 
all the paths in James’s thought led to a conception of the 
Deity. James was attracted to the absolute in so far as he could 
conceive it as an Object of worship. The insight of the pas- 
sive mood brought by suffering and discouragement revealed 
the deeper levels of experience. But the way to God indi- 
cated by the active impulses was just as sure. Our volitional 
activity may be our deepest organ of communication with the 
nature of things. Ethics points to a Deity both in order to 
realize the most stable and systematic code of rules, and also 
to call forth the most thorough-going allegiance to the moral 
ideal. While the moral aim remains dominant, “religion will 
drive irreligion to the wall.” Similarly, the teleological view 
of human activity makes anything less than God irrational, 
anything greater impossible. The testimony of mysticism, 
which we shall later examine in greater detail, lends probabil- 
ity to the notion of a Deity; our subjective nature, which we 
have a right to trust, demands one; and pragmatically the 
value of the God-idea for life encourages us to a positive be- 
lief. That God exists is thus the testimony of many different 
elements in James’s philosophy. 

James’s conception of God seems to have undergone a fairly 
clear line of development, marked by three stages. The dis- 
tinctions between these stages are not absolute, and frequently 
the difference is only a matter of emphasis. But that the dis- 


I22 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 123 


tinction, at least of emphasis, is there it seems impossible to 
deny. The first position is found in the volume called The 
Will to Believe and Other Essays, including articles originally 
published from 1880 to 1895. The second is set forth in The 
Varieties of Religious Experience published in 1902. The final 
statement is found in A Pluralistic Universe published in 1909. 

In the first stage God is conceived primarily as a postulate 
necessary for the letting loose of the strenuous mood, an es- 
sential stimulus to the most vigorous and most highly moral 
life. Other ideas of God are mentioned. As we have already 
seen, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” written before 1880, 
the earliest of the essays published with ‘The Will to Be- 
lieve,” makes favorable references to “ ontological emotion ” 
and “the peace of rationality.” But a careful reading will 
show that the emphasis in this and later essays in the same 
volume is the other way. “‘ Son of Man, stand upon thy feet 
and I will speak to thee!’ is the only revelation of truth to 
which the solving epochs have helped the disciple.” And “ that 
has been enough to satisfy the greater part of his rational 
need.” * All great periods of intellectual expansion have taught 
the lesson: ‘The inmost nature of reality is congenial to 
powers which you possess.” * To be acceptable a philosophy 
must indeed to some degree determine expectancy, but it must 
to a greater degree make an appeal to our capacities for effort. 
Here in “The Sentiment of Rationality ” as in the essay on 
“The Will to Believe” James uses the call to activity as an 
argument for faith in God. In the interests of our active nature 
a God must be postulated. Inferentially, God is that which 
calls forth our latent energy. 

The next essay, on ‘“ Reflex Action and Theism,” an ad- 
dress delivered in 1881, brings this out as clearly as the first. 
Any conception which falls short of God is irrational because 
any conception less than God is an inadequate stimulus to our 
practical nature. But, as we have seen, theism is always ready 
with “the most practically rational solution it is possible to 
conceive. Not an energy of our active nature to which it does 


1 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 88. 2 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 86. 


124 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of which it does 
not normally and naturally release the springs.” * And else- 
where in the same essay James defines God as “‘ A power not 
ourselves . . . which not only makes for righteousness, but 
means it, and which recognizes us.” * 

Energy, power, moral activity, for these things we must 
have God, and the most important definition of God is that 
formulated in terms of his function of arousing them in us. 
The essay on “ The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 
written in 1891, carries this thought on consistently. A world 
without a God lacks the power to appeal in the most stimulat- 
ing way to our moral energy. If there were no other grounds 
for belief men would postulate a Deity simply as a pretext 
for living hard. We need God for this kind of stimulation, we 
postulate him to fill this need, and we define him as the one 
who does so fill it. Our moral and volitional response to life 
seems to be our deepest organ of communication with the 
nature of things, our clearest source of revelation as to that 
nature. 

“Ts Life Worth Living? ” written in 1895, continues in the 
same key. Life zs worth living, James says, since it is what we 
make it, from the moral point of view. By exerting ourselves 
we can force it to be worth living. Our moral activity is the 
determinant. We must believe that our life is worth while, 
and our belief will help to create the fact. Religious faith is 
belief of this sort. We know nothing positive of the unseen 
world, but we believe that the significance of our present life 
consists in our relation to it. This is our nearest clue to a 
knowledge of its nature. Any definition which we make of this 
unseen world or of God must be in terms of significance for 
human life, especially significance in calling forth our most 
strenuous moral powers. Life is a real fight, and ultimate 
reality must be understood as taking cognizance of and even 
having a part in it. 

To this first stage in James’s thought about God belongs an 
illuminating unpublished letter to Thomas Davidson. In this 


8 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 127. 4 The Wil to Believe, etc., p. 122. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 125 


letter the idea of a finite God and a pluralistic melioristic 
world scheme is clearly suggested, though the date of the 
letter is as early as 1882. But the interest here also is in de- 
fining God in terms commensurable with human purposes. 
Our strivings must have an outward warrant, God must be 
that which gives meaning to our moral activity. The “ad- 
dress ” referred to in the first paragraph is apparently that on. 
“Reflex Action and Theism” ; the “squib on Hegel ” seems 
to be the paper written for Professor Palmer’s Hegel class 
which, on Professor Palmer’s suggestion, was published in 
Mind for April, 1882, and later republished along with “‘ The 
Will to Believe” under the title ‘‘On Some Hegelisms.” 


CAMBRIDGE 
January 8, 1882 
My dear Davidson: 

Your letter, just rec’d, makes glad my heart. Next to a 
good Theist, give me a good Atheist; and that you seem to 
have become, — whether in spite or in consequence of Ros- 
mini, ignorance prevents me from deciding. To speak seri- 
ously, your blame is more agreeable to me than most all the 
praise I’ve got for that “address.” The latter left me with 
my bad conscience increased; for the address was a curious 
composition on my part, the conclusions I believed in being 
enforced by arguments which I cared little about and which 
were used merely on account of their availability and ad 
captandum power. I wanted to show that psychology could 
send out an anti-materialistic blast as well as she had been sup- 
posed to emit materialistic ones. I wanted too to give popular 
form to my hobby of the ubiquitousness of emotional interests 
in the mind’s operations. So I rather deliberately sacrificed 
accuracy to effectiveness in taking the reflex triad ready made 
from the psychologists, as if it were a truly mental analysis, 
—and I reaped my reward in much applause. I have felt 
constrained to explain my errors to such correspondents as 
Hodgson and Renouvier. But you don’t attack me for them, 
but for my conclusions, which I hold to. It is a curious thing, 


126 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


this matter of God! I can sympathize perfectly with the most 
rabid hater of him and the idea of him, when I think of the 
use that has been made of him in history and philosophy as a 
starting point, or premise for grounding deductions. But as an 
Ideal to attain and make probable, I find myself less and less 
able to do without Him. He need not be an all-including 
“subjective unity of the universe,” as you suppose. In fact 
there is nothing I clasp hands with you so heartily in, as in 
defying the superstition of such a unity. It is only one pos- 
sible hypothesis amid many — and becomes (d—n my eyes, I 
must call my wife to write for me!) a pure superstition the 
moment it is treated dogmatically. All I mean is that there 
must be some subjective unity in the Universe which has pur- 
poses commensurable with my own and which is at the same 
time large enough to be, among all the powers that may be 
there, the strongest. I simply refuse to accept the notion of 
there being no purpose in the objective world. On the other 
hand, I cannot represent the existence of purpose except as 
based in a mind. The not-me therefore, so far as it contains 
purpose must spring from a mind; but not necessarily a One 
and Only mind. In saying “ God exists” all I imply is that my 
purposes are cared for by a mind so powerful as on the whole 
to control the drift of the Universe. This is as much poly- 
theism as monotheism. As a matter of fact it is neither, for 
it is hardly a speculative position at all but a merely practical 
and emotional faith which I fancy even your Promethean 
Gemiith shares. The only difficulties of theism are the moral 
difficulties and meannesses; and they have always seemed to me 
to flow from the gratuitous dogma of God being the all-in- 
clusive reality. Once think possible a primordial pluralism 
of which he may be one member and which may have no 
single subjective synthesis, and piety forthwith ceases to be 
incompatible with manliness and religious ‘“ Faith” with in- 
tellectual rectitude. In short the only theism I defend is that 
of simple unphilosophic mankind, to which numerical mys- 
teries are added corruptions. If there be a God, how the devil 
can we know what difficulties he may have had to contend 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 127 


with? (This last remark is from my amanuensis spouse.) 
Darauf kommt es an! Possible difficulties! they save every- 
thing. But what are they but limitations to the all-inclusive- 
ness of any single being? 


January oth. Since last night we have finished reading aloud 
your article on Rosmini which we began some days back. 
It amused me to find how some of your phrases at the end 
agree with those I have used in this letter. It is a strong arti- 
cle both in style and matter, and ought to produce an impres- 
sion; but what will your Rosminian friends think of you after 
reading your Auslassungen against their religion? I wish I 
could get a glimpse of the meaning of R’s system. Not a line 
of the Psicologia I hoped to read this winter has been looked 
at yet — So runs the world away! 

What news can I tell you? Nothing in the college, where 
the old routine prevails. Harris has founded a weekly Satur- 
day afternoon Hegel Club where he expounds the third vol- 
ume of the Logik to ten of us, Palmer, Cabot, Hall, Everett, 
Emery and some others. I am much won by his innocence 
and apostolic disposition, but not a word has he said that has 
any magic for me. I rather shrink from hurting his feelings 
by my squib on Hegel and have left the decision in the hands 
of Robertson. I am sorry you find Hodgson confused. To not 
many of us is it granted to be confused on such a scale! 


Dr. Gibson, who I think must have been a rather big, mod- 
est, silent bearded man, with whom I dined at Hodgson’s one 
day, I supposed to be himself an Hegelian from the manner 
of his review of Sully’s J//usions in Harris’ Journal. 


Addio, Davidson mio. If there 7s a God, where will you be 
on the day of judgment? The immortality of which you are 
so certain will keep you forever exposed to his wrath. Write 
again soon to yours ever 

WM. JAMES 


128 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


The contention that at this time in his life James was in- 
terested in defining God chiefly in terms of his function as a 
stimulus to men is confirmed by the realization that these es- 
says and this letter were written during a period when the 
theory of pragmatism was beginning to take on interest for 
James. Charles S. Peirce had printed his ‘“ Illustrations of 
the Logic of Science ” the year before “‘ The Sentiment of Ra- 
tionality” appeared, the famous second paper in Peirce’s 
series, called ‘“‘ How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” having been 
published in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878. 
“Consider what effects,” Peirce had written, ‘‘ which might 
conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object 
of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these ef- 
fects is the whole of our conception of the object.” ° This de- 
fining a conception in terms of its effects is just what James 
has done here. Pragmatism, at this period of his life, meant 
this kind of procedure. It was a theory of the definition of 
conceptions in terms of their practical consequence, and it was 
not the elaborate theory of truth and value which James after- 
wards made it. Even in 1898, in the Berkeley address on 
“Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” where he 
first uses the word “ pragmatism,” James applies it only to 
this kind of case, using it to define ideas in terms of con- 
sequences. It is interesting to notice further that two of the 
ideas prominent in the essays we have been discussing, the 
subordination of conceptual to volitional activity, and the in- 
terdependence of belief and action, are found in Peirce’s 
article. 

What we have called the first stage in James’s developing 
conception of God is therefore the stage in which, using his 
earliest version of the pragmatic theory he defined God in 
terms of his function as releaser of man’s active energies. The 
case is different when we come to the second stage, set forth 
in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Here the interest 
shifts from man’s active energies to God’s saving power. 
Throughout the Varieties James seems ever to be impressed 

5 Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12, p. 293. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 129 


anew by the power of the religious Object. God comforts the 
sick soul, encourages the healthy-minded, knits up the divided 
self, accomplishes conversion, leads on to saintliness, communi- 
cates with mystics, and is the author of saving experiences in 
which work is undeniably accomplished. These experiences are 
so real that their cause must be real. So much work must re- 
quire a Worker. To say that the kind of cause to which those 
who have religious experiences almost unanimously testify is 
imaginary is to be untrue to the empirical ideal. Accepting the 
data given, we find work being done which does not readily 
lend itself to analysis according to our usual human categories. 
No more do we need to postulate, we have merely to describe 
what we see going on. The interest, it seems fair to say, is no 
longer anthropocentric but theocentric. 

Correspondingly, while in the Varieties the active energies 
are not neglected, it is the passive mood which receives the 
greater amount of attention. On the whole it is not man’s ac- 
tive energy, but his capacity to receive help from on high 
which is stressed. The moment of discouragement may bring 
the deeper insight. ‘‘ Morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider 
scale of experience,” and life’s ills may be “ possibly the only 
openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” The deep- 
est need of the human heart may be not for combat but for 
assurance and peace. 

James announces at the beginning of the Varieties that his 
criterion of value is results, not origins, and the book as a 
whole is largely a description of the results for life of religion. 
One of the early chapters treats of the reality and objective 
quality of the unseen presence immediately experienced in 
religion. The two following explain how religion brings serenity, 
poise, and immunity to certain kinds of disease, and show that 
in the deliverance which it brings lies religion’s chief claim to 
our interest. The next three chapters describe the remarkable 
phenomena attending conversion, including spiritual activity of 
a highly dramatic nature. Following this comes a discussion of 
“ Saintliness ” with its fruits for life, and here James says ex- 
plicitly that the value of results is a determinant of the ob- 


130 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


jective reality of the agency which produces the results. 
Since saintliness tests high ethically the beliefs which inspire 
it stand accredited. Mysticism, likewise, brings its own un- 
impeachable authority to the person to whom it comes, and 
prayer is a condition in which spiritual work is really accom- 
plished. 

Finally, in his conclusions, James comes out unequivocally 
for the significance of the spiritual activity which all these ex- 
periences describe, and for the reality of the agency by which 
they are produced. All religions are capable of description, 
he says, in terms of: (1) An uneasiness, and (2) Its solution, 
z.e., by the sense that there is something wrong about us as 
we stand, and the sense “that we are saved from the wrong- 
ness by making proper connections with the higher powers.” 
Man becomes conscious of a “ more” which is conterminous 
and continuous with the higher part of himself “ which is op- 
erative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep 
in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and 
save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the 
wreck.” ° 

He then goes on to his famous theory that “‘ whatever it 
may be on its farther side, the ‘more’ with which in reli- 
gious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its ither 
side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. 
Whether or not this be a satisfactory way of describing our 
means of contact with the Object of religious experience we are 
not here interested in deciding. The point to be stressed is that 
in this book the actual power of the religious experience was 
uppermost in James’s mind. It is this which leads to state- 
ments like the following: “‘ we have in the fact that the con- 
scious person is continuous with a wider self through which 
saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experi- 
ence which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as 
far as it goes”’* And James does not hesitate to identify the 
source of these saving experiences with God. “TI will call this 
higher part of the universe by the name of God. We and God 


6 Varieties, p. 508. 7 Varieties, p. 212. 8 Varieties, p. 515. 


PY a, 


OF WILLIAM AMES 131 


have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his 
influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.” ° 

The difference between this and the first stage is readily 
apparent. No longer is it our active energies which need a 
postulated God to call them forth. Here the emphasis is all 
on the active energies of God, on God’s power to produce 
real effects. And along with the change of emphasis from the 
powers of men to the power of God goes a change of scene. 
We are no longer in the world of moral postulates, but have 
entered the field of psychological description! Our part here is 
to describe rather than to postulate. “‘ Over-beliefs”’ may 
enter, we may have postulates in that sense, but they take the 
form of hypotheses as to probable causes rather than demands 
made on the basis of some subjective interest. 

Let us notice also that the transition between these two 
stages in James’s conception of God is paralleled by a develop- 
ment in his pragmatic theory. If the first stage is marked by a 
pragmatism which is directly influenced by Peirce, and finds its 
chief interest in defining concepts in terms of their practical 
consequences, this second stage is marked by a tendency to 
define truth itself in terms of value. A reference to their prac- 
tical consequences helps not only to make our ideas clear, but 
to determine their truth, or the reality of their objects. Both 
kinds of pragmatism do, as a matter of fact, enter the Varie- 
ties. In the chapter on “ Philosophy ” James invokes pragma- 
tism by name (which he did not do in the volume on The Will 
to Believe) to test the significance of God’s metaphysical at- 
tributes. Finding that they have no pragmatic meaning, he 
rejects them. But it is particularly interesting to note that 
James did not stop with this attempt to extract a pragmatic 
meaning for God’s attributes as traditionally enumerated. God 
is more than the attributes which have traditionally been 
predicated of him, and pragmatism is equipped to discover 
this more. In attempting to do this pragmatism is but mak- 
ing explicit use of what has always been an implicit popu- 
lar means to the discovery of truth. Religions have always 


9 Varieties, p. 516. 


132 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


approved themselves to mankind by their fruits for life, and 
it is reasonable that we should set up value as a standard 
of truth now. “How can any possible judge or critic help 
being biased in favor of the religion by which his own needs 
are best met? ”’*® As we saw above, if religion commends it- 
self as a desirable kind of human activity, “ then any theologi- 
cal beliefs that may inspire it will stand accredited. If not, 
then they will be discredited, and all without reference to any- 
thing but human working principles.” ** | 

This, it will be observed, is a clear reference to the deter- 
mination not only of clearness and meaning, but of truth, on 
the basis of value and “ working,” and this procedure is char- 
acteristic of James throughout the Varieties. Values point the 
way to truth, and particular facts indicate underlying ultimate 
principles. “‘ Both instinctively and for logical reasons,” he 
writes, “I find it hard to believe that principles can exist 
which make no difference in facts. But all facts are particular 
facts, and the whole interest of the question of God’s existence 
seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars which 
that existence may be expected to entail.” **;There is no dif- 
ference of theory without a corresponding difference of practice 
and of fact. So much Peirce had said. But now, at least im- 
plicitly, James applies the converse of this proposition and, 
finding marked differences in fact and practice, he makes a 
difference in his theory to fit them. In two ways, then, we see 
an advance from the earlier position. Formerly he had said 
that a need justifies a postulate. Now he suggests that an em- 
pirical value points to an ultimate truth. And secondly he is 
here not content to say that clear definitions of ideas can be 
made only in terms of consequences. He goes on to the further 
position that there is no difference among particular facts with- 
out a corresponding difference in theory; his interest is not in 
the clarity of ideas so much as in the new principles which 
particular facts suggest. 

It is evident that we have here a parallel development of 
James’s religious theory and his pragmatic theory in which we 


10 Varieties, p. 333. 11 Varieties, p. 331. 12 Varieties, p. 522. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 133 


can see mutual influences at work. Clearly James’s developing 
sense of a pragmatic standard had something to do with his 
belief that religion could claim objective truth as well as sub- 
jective value. And it seems just as clear that James’s investi- 
gation of religion, bringing him into touch with such a mass 
of testimony as to the existence of a kind of value to which 
he was himself not at all insensitive, played its part in helping 
him to the realization that worth for life must be a criterion 
of truth. Not pnly is the rational the real, but the truly valu- 
able is the real, the belief that brings truly valuable conse- 
quences must have some hold on reality. Such important differ- 
ences in concrete fact must point to an important speculative 
element of which our theory should take account. In this book, 
published in 1902, James appears to be approaching the more 
radical statement of pragmatic theory which found expression 
in the volume Pragmatism, published in 1907, and which, sig- 
nificantly, was not included in his first utterance on the sub- 
ject, the Berkeley address delivered in 1898. We have thus 
found another place where James’s religious philosophy takes 
an influential place in his thought. The study of religious phe- 
nomena and the conclusions which it was necessary to draw 
from that study appear to have influenced his conception of 
truth itself. 

Turning now to what we have called the third stage in the 
development of his conception of the Deity, we find that it 
combines the chief characteristics of the other two. To begin 
with, in A Pluralistic Universe, where this third position is 
set forth, James repeats his comment in the Varieties that the 
testimony of experience to the working of power from on high 
must influence our notion of the existence of a religious Object. 
God works in a mysterious way. Religious experiences are of a 
specific nature and not deducible from our other sorts of ex- 
perience. Examining religious experience we find “‘ possibilities 
that take our breath away, of another kind of happiness and 
power, based on giving up our will and letting something higher 
work for us.” ** Reasoning in a priori fashion we should never 


18 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 305. 


134 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


have suspected the working of this higher power, but pro- 
ceeding empirically we must take these experiences into ac- 
count. “‘ As they actually come and are given, creation widens 
to the view of their recipients.” ** ‘“ We inhabit an invisible 
spiritual environment from which help comes, our soul being 
mysteriously one with a larger soul whose instruments we 
are.”’ 15 

But along with this emphasis on God as saving Power, char- 
acteristic of what we have called James’s second position, we 
find in A Pluralistic Universe a similar emphasis on the fact 
that God’s nature is such as to call forth our most active re- 
sponse. We live in a pluralistic world, for any other kind 
would take away all life’s zest and meaning. Pluralism means 
real losses as well as real achievements, and it stimulates us 
to real effort, where monism sets up merely a thin abstraction. 
God is a part of this pluralistic world and so he is finite, but 
on that very account more approachable and more of a real 
leader and inspirer. “‘ Having an environment, being in time, 
and working out a history just like ourselves, he escapes from 
the foreignness from all that is human, of the static, timeless, 
perfect absolute.” *° If God be working out a history ‘“ just 
like ourselves ” we enjoy an intimacy with him and respond 
to his will in a way impossible under any other system. Our 
whole active nature is quickened by the thought that we are 
co-laborers with God, aiding him in the realization of purposes 
that are ours as well as his. 

In the autumn of 1904, that is, between the publication of 
the Varieties and A Pluralistic Universe, or at the beginning of 
this third period in the development of his conception of God, 
James answered Professor J. B. Pratt’s questionnaire on reli- 
gious belief. In his answers we find indications of the attitude 
which was to become so prominent in A Pluralistic Universe. 
God carries our ideals to fruition and we share in his purposes. 
But we touch him in our weakness as well as in our strength. 


14 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 306. 
15 4 Pluralistic Universe, p. 308. 
16 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 318. 


There is a 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 135 


“wider universe of experiences ’” which ministers 


to our needs. Some of the replies were as follows: 


Q. What do you mean by God? 


A, 


A combination of Ideality and (final) efficacity. 


Q. Is He a person — if so, what do you mean by His being a 


A, 


person? 
He must be cognizant and responsive in some way. 


Q. Or is He only a Force? 


A, 


He must do. 


Q. Or is God an attitude of the Universe toward you? 


A, 


Q. Why 


Yes, but more conscious. “‘ God,” to me, is not the 
only spiritual reality to believe in. Religion means 
primarily a universe of spiritual relations sur- 
rounding the earthly practical ones, not merely 
relations of ‘“‘ value,’ but agencies and their ac- 
tivities. I suppose that the chief premise for my 
hospitality towards the religious testimony of 
others is my conviction that ‘“ normal” or “ sane ” 
consciousness is so small a part of actual experi- 
ence. What e’er be true, if is not true exclusively, 
as philistine scientific opinion assumes. The other 
kinds of consciousness bear witness to a much 
wider universe of experiences, from which our 
belief selects and emphasizes such parts as best 
satisfy our needs. 


do you believe in God? Is it . . . because you 
have experienced His presence? 


A. No, but rather because I need it so that it “ must ” 


be true. 


Q. Or do you not so much believe in God as want to use 


A, 


Him? 
I can’t use him very definitely, yet I believe. 


136 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


QO. Do you accept Him not so much as a real existent Being, 
but rather as an ideal to live by? 


A. More as a powerful ally of my own ideals.” 


Thus the two conceptions, God as Power, and God as in- 
citer of our powers, are combined in this third and last stage 
in James’s progress toward a satisfactory conception of God. 
We have seen that the other two stages marked points of ad- 
vance in James’s pragmatism as well as in his religious theory. 
Correspondingly we find in this third stage an echo of one 
of the latest developments of pragmatism, the doctrine of 
-meliorism. This doctrine is explicitly set forth only in the 
book Pragmatism, and in any detail only in the last chapter 
of that book. It is a theory of the nature of reality and of 
man’s ability to cooperate with God in effecting changes in real- 
ity. James describes it as standing midway between optimism 
and pessimism. It offers a social scheme of cooperative work 
to be engaged in by God and man together. It realizes, that is 
to say, the intimacy between God and man which James finds 
possible in a pluralistic universe, and it calls on the Power of 
God and the powers of man to effect real changes for the better 
in a growing world. 

The description of these three stages in James’s theory has 
not by any means exhausted the kind of God or Gods which 
James suggested as possible objects of belief, or their attri- 
butes. Nowhere does James’s imagination play more freely than 
on this subject. He always professed himself as particularly 
interested in ‘“ over-beliefs.” He found them ‘“ the most inter- 
esting and important things about a man.” His own over-be- 
liefs as expressed in different places in his writings are many 
and various, and at times border on the grotesque. His plural- 
istic bent, particularly, at times carried him to extremes. That 
he himself may have felt this is indicated by his calling his own 
position that of “ crass ” or ‘‘ piecemeal supernaturalism.” One 
of the most curious possibilities is described in the much quoted 
‘Postscript ” to the Varieties where he suggests that “ beyond 


17 Letters, pp. 213-4. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 137 


each man and in a fashion continuous with him” there may 
exist a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. 
‘““. . It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might 
conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self of 
which the present self would then be but a mutilated expres- 
sion, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such 
selves. . .. Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon 
EG a ee 
Much in James suggests that he was drawn at times to some 
such polytheistic view. The lecture on immortality hints at 
the possibility of many orders of beings. Fechner’s hierarchy 
of spirits he seems to have taken half seriously as a hypothesis. 
The earth soul he calls something to which we can pray as men 
pray to their saints. Monism is a lifeless conception. “ Ordi- 
nary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out. 
. . . First you and I, just as we are in this room; and the mo- 
ment we get below that surface, the unutterable absolute it- 
self! Doesn’t this show a singularly indigent imagination? 
Isn’t this brave universe made on a richer pattern, with room 
in it for a long hierarchy of beings? ” *° 
This extraordinary “ piecemeal supernaturalism ” represents 
the extreme to which James’s pluralistic imagination led him. 
Alongside of this pluralistic extreme should be placed the 
pragmatic extreme to which some writers have been driven, 
though James himself seems to have been on his guard against 
it. This is the position that while the idea of God is a useful 
one in human experience it is useful only as idea and has no 
objective reality. Frazer’s famous definition of religion as pro- 
pitiation of superior powers with a view to their use *° opened 
the way to this type of thinking, and Professor Leuba brought 
the idea into prominence in his much-quoted article in the 
Monist ** where he said: ‘‘ God is not known . . . he is used 
. sometimes as meat purveyor, sometimes as moral sup- 
port.” Professors Irving King and E. S. Ames are sometimes 
interpreted as emphasizing the usefulness of the God idea and 


18 P, o2e, 20 Golden Bough, 1: 63. 
19 4 Pluralistic Universe, p. 175. PLUTT 2) S 71k 


138 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


minimizing its objective validity, while in writers like Feuer- 
bach and Vaihinger God becomes a useful product of the 
imagination or “ fiction.” But James’s pragmatism is careful 
to avoid this extreme position. The constant argument of the 
Varieties is that the activity observed in religious experience 
presupposes an objective agency, mysticism is treated as defi- 
nitely a perceptual experience and express care is taken that 
God shall not be identified with the subconscious self. “‘ If you, 
being orthodox Christians,” he writes, ‘ask me as a psycholo- 
gist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a subliminal self 
does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the Deity 
altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do 
not see why it necessarily should.” * 

God exists, or some Power or Powers exist, and whether 
Deity be one or many, pluralism and pragmatism as well as 
ordinary common sense require that it be fimite. ‘‘ God, in the 
religious life of ordinary men, is the name not of the whole 
of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal tendency in 
things. . . . He works in an external environment, has limits, 
and has enemies.” ** Monism, as we have seen in detail, is 
internally inconsistent and externally indifferent to human 
moral value. It interferes with human freedom and it fails to 
meet the problem set by the existence of evil. “ My ‘ God of 
things as they are,’ ”’ wrote James, ‘‘ being part of a pluralistic 
system is responsible for only such of them as he knows enough 
and has enough power to have accomplished. . . . The ‘ om- 
niscient? and ‘omnipotent’ God of theology I regard as a 
disease of the philosophy-shop.” ** “ The line of least resist- 
ance, then, as it seems to me, both in theology and in philoso- 
phy, is to accept, along with the superhuman consciousness, 
the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion, in other 
words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power 
or in knowledge, or in both at once.” * 

James has often been pointed to as a radical on this question 


22 Varieties, p. 242. 

23 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 124. 

24 From a letter to C. A. Strong, Letters 2: 269. 
25 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 311. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 139 


of a limited God, yet the fact is that in this particular he has 
only been following one of the distinctive tendencies of West- 
ern religious philosophy as compared with that of the Orient. 
The absolute and the infinite have always been more at home 
in the East. The West, with its interest in practicality, per- 
sonality, and purpose has been driven to a different kind of 
thought. It is easy enough to sympathize with absolutistic at- 
tempts to satisfy both the intellectual and the mystical crav- 
ings for unity, and the absolutistic systems of our own day 
meet the philosophical and religious needs of many people. 
But there is apparent a growing tendency among writers on 
religion to show how much better other systems are able to 
meet the demands, especially the moral demands of our gen- 
eration. 

Sir Charles Eliot in Hinduism and Buddhism has effec- 
tively contrasted the Western insistence on the reality of 
evil, of time, of change, purpose, conflict, and achievement with 
the Eastern view of the monistic Being for whom there is no 
purpose, just “sport,” no goal but only an endless and aim- 
less round of existences. It seems clear that one of the mo- 
tives which led Eastern thinkers to this position was the urge 
to free the Deity from limitations. What could be less hamper- 
ing than the condition of Brahman? Nothing else exists but 
Maya, and it is illusion. Or what more ultimate than the 
Thibetan Adi-Buddha in whom all other Buddhas have their 
origin, or than the Chinese Tao, the very way of the cosmos 
itself, or than the Bhutatathata, translated in English by the 
expressive title ‘“ Suchness,” of which Asvaghosa exhorts us 
to “think joyfully ” ? 

But in both East and West these attempts to reduce all to 
one underlying principle have failed to be satisfactory because 
they have made distinctions, the most necessary things in our 
every-day experience, ultimately unreal. Sankara’s pantheism 
was not far removed from the nihilism of Nagarjuna. And the 
scholastic attempt in the Middle Ages to protect the Deity 
from limitations only succeeded in limiting him completely. 
To ascribe infinity to him was to deny all else including all 


140 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


that was worth while. Hume in his essay on The Natural 
History of Religion observes that theism developed out of 
polytheism by increasing “ adulation.” That is to say, men 
vied with each other in ascribing greatness to the Deity until 
he finally became as great as their words could make him. 
And in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he hints 
that absolutism may have come about in much the same way, 
and that both philosophy and religion would be better off if the 
conception of an infinite God were superseded by “a more ac- 
curate and moderate ”’ idea. 

Obviously enough the modern conception of a limited God 
traces its ancestry back to the beginnings of thought. The 
gods of primitive man, being many, were limited. Even the 
‘“‘Mana” conception had pluralistic implications.** For the 
Greeks life was too full of things both beautiful and ugly to 
be reducible to a monotonous unity. Chaos produced gods and 
men, Xenophon was told, but he received no answer to his 
question: Who produced Chaos? As far back as the Milesians 
there was speculation about an ultimate “‘ physis” and also 
about the gods, but little attempt to combine the two and think 
out a Deity who should be ultimate. Later on, Plato could not 
refer to God the origin of evil, and Aristotle found form 
struggling with matter. 

Theological development among the Hebrews followed simi- 
Jar lines. In the beginning, God, said the authors of the Pen- 
tateuch, yet the rhythmically powerful Elohim was even in 
the beginning a limited God, hampered by the materials with 
which he worked if not by his own purposes. Yahweh’s limi- 
tations appear even more clearly. But while they are clear 
to us they were either not clear or not important to his wor- 
shippers. It is not until the time of Marcion that the diffi- 
culties inherent in the notion of a redeeming Creator come to 
consciousness. With the rise of scholasticism a desperate at- 
tempt is made to remove all inconsistencies by careful defini- 
tion. It is difficult to imagine any improvement in this direc- 
_tion on Anselm’s statement that God is that than which noth- 
26 Cf. Hopkins, “ The History of Religions,” pp. 18, 67 ff. 


OF WILLIAM AMES 141 


ing greater can be conceived! In Anselm’s time and later, the 
dualism inherited from both Greece and Persia seems para- 
doxically to have come to the aid of the monistic metaphysi- 
cian, enabling him to place the supernatural realm so far above 
the natural as to make all human categories and predicates 
inapplicable to Deity. 

But when God is so far removed that the only statement 
which can be made about him is that no statement can be made, 
we may well ask what need, religious or other, he can fill. 
This question, as we have seen, was raised in emphatic form 
by Hume and in even more trenchant fashion by J. S. Mill in 
his Three Essays on Religion. No reader of Mill can for- 
get the graphic illustrations he uses to show the frustration 
of any imagined benevolent Omnipotence, or the forceful man- 
ner in which he turns the argument from design back upon its 
proponents, insisting that design means contrivance, 7.e., lack 
of power. Arguments similar to those of Mill were used in a 
book published in 1822 purporting to come from a “ Philip , 
Beauchamp ” but now supposed to have been written by Ben- 
tham and Grote. Samuel Butler in the last chapter of his God 
the Known and God the Unknown calls his Deity only “ quasi- 
omnipotent and quasi-all-wise.” Among modern contenders 
for a limited God one of the most outstanding is Professor 
Schiller, who claims in Riddles of the Sphinx that as applied 
to God or to any other reality the epithet “infinite” has no 
meaning. Professor J. M. E. McTaggart concludes in Some 
Dogmas of Religion that we save God’s moral character by 
limiting his power. Professor L. T. Hobhouse, in Develop- 
ment and Purpose, finds that the presence of mechanism, dis- 
cord, and evil prevents one from identifying the object of 
contemplation with the whole of things and from ascribing om- 
nipotence to it. Mr. Balfour in The Foundations of Belief dis- 
covers that the Christian conception of God as one who took 
on human limitations satisfies the deepest ethical need. Pro- 
fessor G. H. Howison believes that minds must be independent 
of God. “In no other way am I able to conceive how, at 
once, God can be good, and there can be in the imperfect 


142 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


and catastrophic world an order really moral.” ** Professor 
James Ward in The Realm of Ends claims that “ Oriental 
servility and a priori speculation have made God synonymous 
with an ‘ Infinite and Absolute,’ ” and that the traditional con- 
ception must be revised in such a way as to afford autonomy to 
men, making them co-workers with God. Dr. Hastings Rash- 
dall in The Theory of Good and Evil suggests that the term 
infinite can more properly be applied to that which includes 
God and other spirits than to God himself, and that to 
avoid limiting God’s goodness a definite restriction must be 
placed on his power. A popular statement of the conception 
of a limited God is H. G. Wells’s God the Invisible King, 
made apparently on the basis of a convincing religious ex- 
perience. 

The indictment of an absolute and infinite God by all these 
writers is made on grounds that are practically unanimous. 
God must have personality and purpose, man must have free- 
dom and capacity for moral achievement, theology must face 
squarely the problem of evil. The results of this attack are 
seen in such philosophical works as Professor Pringle-Patti- 
son’s The Idea of God where omnipotence is made to con- 
sist of a continuous process of redemption, and absolutism is 
re-interpreted so as to contain “ all the strenuousness, the sense 
of uttermost reality in the struggle, on which James rightly 
insists.” ** And we notice its influence in the work of a the- 
ologian like Bishop McConnell who in Js God Limited ad- 
mits that the word absolute may hardly express the idea at 
which the religious person is aiming when he uses it, and pro- 
fesses indifference as to whether the ‘‘ metaphysical quality ” 
of omnipotence be retained. Perhaps as satisfactory a syn- 
thesis of the two views as any is that of Professor D. C. Mac- 
intosh, who reaches the absoluteness of God by way of ex- 
perience rather than the high @ priori road. ‘He is great 
enough to be absolutely dependable and the adequate Source 
of inner preparedness for anything that can happen, and the 
Source of actual salvation, deliverance from evil, for all who 


27 Hibbert Journal, 1: 121. 28 P. 413. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 143 


persist in the right religious adjustment.” God is the abso- 
lute of experimental religion, “ the absolutely dependable Ob- 
ject of dependence and Source of salvation.” *? Professor Mac- 
intosh meets the problem of evil by insisting that while this 
is not the best possible world it is the best possible kind of 
world. We must have law though it be accompanied by suf- 
fering. 

James uses practically all the arguments for a limited God 
which we have noticed in these other writers and combines 
with them an especially emphatic insistence on the need for 
intimacy with the Deity. God must be limited to be approach- 
able. We must be able to share his purposes. The closest in- 
timacy is effected by thinking of God as continuous with us 
spiritually while at the same time we are morally independent, 
—the synthesis of the best in both pantheism and dualism 
which James thinks a spiritual pluralism brings. 

The view of a continuity of consciousness between God and 
man is one to which James gave frequent expression. It is be- 
lieved by some of his former pupils that toward the end of his 
life James was coming to a belief in a form of panpsychism.*° 
Radical empiricism seems to be capable of interpretation along 
panpsychical lines, and problems as to the relation of man to 
any possible religious objects are hinted at in the questions 
raised by radical empiricism about the influence on each other 
of narrower and wider spans of experience (e.g., in the essay 
on ‘‘ The Experience of Activity”). For if there be a God, 
he is not the all-knower or the experiencer of all reality, but 
simply ‘‘ the experiencer of widest actual conscious span.” 

This suggestion of spiritual continuity between Deity and 
worshipper, the last feature of James’s discussion of God which 
we shall take up, is important and finds expression in many 
different places. In the essay, ‘‘ Is Life Worth Living? ” James 
suggested that our whole physical life might be soaking in 


29 Theology as an Empirical Science, pp. 176 ff. 

30 Cf. also “ William James and Panpsychism” by Professor Wendell T. 
Bush in the recently published second volume of the Columbia University 
Studies in the History of Ideas. 


144 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present 
have no organ for apprehending. The lecture on Human Im- 
mortality looked to Fechner and his theory of continuous 
consciousnesses for analogies, though James does not have as 
much to say as does Fechner about man’s opportunity on his 
own account to start currents which work toward the Deity. 
In the Varieties, as we have seen, much is made of man’s 
capacity to receive spiritual power from an agency apparently 
outside but continuous with himself. In 1906 James wrote: 
“Tt is high time that the hypothesis of a world-consciousness 
should be discussed seriously.” ** Finally, in the last two 
chapters of A Pluralistic Universe he definitely places his 
theory of the continuity of experience at the service of re- 
ligion. A single field of consciousness shades off into other 
fields — larger, more extensive fields which suggest a higher 
than human experience. “ Every bit of us at every moment is 
part and parcel of a wider self, it quivers along various radii 
like the wind-rose on a compass, and the actual in it is con- 
tinuously one with possibles not yet in our present sight. And 
just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary margin, 
may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really 
central self in things which is co-conscious with the whole of 
us? May not you and I be confluent in a higher conscious- 
ness, and confluently active there, though we now know it 
not?” °° We may indeed, and we may know of our own “ con- 
fluence ” if we will only listen to the testimony of experience. 
“‘T think it may be asserted that there are religious experiences 
of a specific nature. . . . I think that they point with reason- 
able probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a 
wider spiritual environment.” *° 

The approach to God through James’s philosophy is then 
as sure as it can be made in a philosophy which has forsworn 
apodictic certainty. Pragmatically we both test and postu- 
late him, through pluralism we provide for a community of 
interest with him, empirically we know him. 


81 Collected Essays, etc., p. 469. 82 Pp. 289-90. 83 Pp, 299-300. 


Vil 
IMMORTALITY 


T HAS commonly been supposed that James’s interest in 
immortality was not very great,— “relatively slight ” 
one commentator has called it. As a consequence little 

has been written on this phase of James’s belief. Where the 
topic has been treated at all the approach has usually been 
in one of two ways. The first way has been to quote from the 
Ingersoll lecture on Human Immortality the statement: “I 
have to confess that my own personal feeling about immor- 
tality has never been of the keenest order,”* or from the 
concluding chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience: 
“‘T have said nothing in my lectures about immortality or the 
belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point,” * and to 
leave the matter there. The second way has been to point to 
James’s researches among psychical phenomena and to say 
that whatever view he did hold was determined by his inves- 
tigation of mediums and their trances. 

Both of these supposed clues seem, however, to be mislead- 
ing. The expressed lack of interest is belied by too much else 
in James to be taken at its face value. And we must remember 
his imaginative and lively interest in all objects of human re- 
gard and aspiration. “ Overbeliefs ” always attracted his at- 
tention. It would surely be surprising if James with all his 
human sympathy and his willingness to allow hope a part in 
the formation of belief should not himself have cherished any 
overbeliefs on a question of such recurrent interest as that of 
life after death. 

4°23) as 5244 
145 


146 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


James’s expression of his own overbeliefs does not always 
occur in the place where we should expect to find it. For ex- 
ample, in his book on religion where we might suppose the hope- 
ful note would be dominant, he dismisses the question of im- 
mortality as “‘ eminently a case for facts to testify.” * And on 
the other hand, in the midst of a psychological discussion we 
come upon the remark that “the surest warrant for immortal- 
ity is the yearning of our bowels for our dear ones.” * Because 
the alternation of these two attitudes, the purely scientific and 
the more personal, is so constant in James it is necessary for a 
discussion of his belief in immortality to touch on each point 
of view in turn. For a clear understanding of his personal atti- 
tude it will be necessary first to make a brief review of the 
result of his scientific research. 

James’s interest in the English and American Societies for 
Psychical Research is well known. In 1884, two years after its 
organization, he became a member of the English Society, and 
he was active in helping to found the American branch. An 
unpublished letter to Thomas Davidson is interesting in this 


connection. 


BELLEVUE Court, 
Newport, R. L., 
February 1, 1885 


My dear Davidson: 

Your letter has been forwarded to me here, .arriving Satur- 
day P.M., So my answer cannot be “ immediate ” as you desire. 

I suppose the meeting of “‘ Psychicals ” to which you are 
invited tomorrow is in New York. I know nothing about it, not 
even whether it consists of members of our Society. I have seen 
no “report of proceedings ” of our society, so think it may be 
something else. As for any “anti-spiritual basis’ of our so- 
ciety, no theoretic basis, or bias, of any sort whatever, so far as 
I can make out, exists in it. The one thing that has struck me 
all along in the men who have had to do with it is their com- 
plete colourlessness philosophically. They seem to have no 
preferences for any generalism whatever. I doubt if this could 
be matched in Europe. Anyhow, it would make no difference in 

3 Varieties, p. 524. 4 Principles of Psychology, 2: 308. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 147 


the important work to be done, what theoretic bias the mem- 
bers had. For I take it the urgent thing, to rescue us from the 
present disgraceful condition, is to ascertain in a manner so 
thorough as to constitute evidence that will be accepted by out- 
siders, just what the phenomenal conditions of certain concrete 
phenomenal occurrences are. Not till that is done can spiritu- 
alistic or anti-spiritualistic theories be ever mooted. I am sure 
that the more we can steer clear of theories at first the better. 
The choice of officers was largely dictated by motives of policy. 
Not that scientific men are necessarily better judges of all truth 
than others, but that their adhesion would popularly seem bet- 
ter evidence than the adhesion of others, in this matter. And 
what we want is not only truth, but evidence. We shall be lucky 
if our scientific names do not grow discredited the instant they 
subscribe to any “ spiritual ”’ manifestations. But how much 
easier to discredit literary men, philosophers or clergymen! I 
think Newcomb for President was an uncommon hit —if he 
believes he will probably carry others. You’d better chip in, 
and not complicate matters by talking either of spiritualism or 
anti-spiritualism. ‘‘ Facts’ are what are wanted... . 


Wo. JAMES 


In the course of his investigation of psychical phenomena cer- 
tain things particularly attracted James’s attention. In the first 
place he became much interested in hallucinations. He con- 
ducted a census of these, devoting considerable attention to the 
reports he received, and he records as especially noteworthy 
the conclusion of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sidgwick in England 
that the number of instances where the apparition of a person 
was seen on the day of that person’s death was over four hun- 
dred times too great to be ascribed to coincidence.’ Secondly, 
James seems to have been inclined to believe in the fact of 
telepathy in certain instances.® Third, in his study of mediums 
James was impressed by the genuineness of the external urge 
whose power the medium felt. Fourth, he was particularly in- 


5 The Will to Believe and Other Essays, p. 312. 
8 Proceedings American S. P. R. 1909, p. 506. 


148 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


terested in Frederick Myers’s suggestion that the hypothesis of 
a “subliminal self ”’ might be used to relate the phenomena of 
hypnotism, automatism, and double personality. 

Yet none of these appears to have influenced him toward a 
belief in the existence of departed spirits. Hallucinations and 
telepathy in themselves had no direct bearing on the problem. 
The urge felt by the medium might be real yet its source a 
matter of serious question. And the conception of a “ sublimi- 
nal self ” which interested Myers chiefly because of its sug- 
gestion as to personal survival of bodily death James found 
useful only in another field, and employed it as a means of ex- 
plaining certain phenomena connected with religious experience. 
More germane to the whole question of immortality James 
found two other matters, one an empirical datum, the other a 
hypothesis. The first of these was the apparent presence in the 
minds of mediums of knowledge attained in a supernormal way. 
The second was the possibility of the existence of a spiritual 
environment of consciousness, “‘ diffuse soul stuff,” or a cosmic 
reservoir of memories. 

The supernormal knowledge of the medium presented a 
puzzling problem. James discusses it in several papers, two of 
which are now printed respectively with The Will to Believe 
and in Collected Essays and Reviews. His final opinion is 
summed up in a letter about Mrs. Piper, with whom he had 
had the most positive results obtained in all his research: 
‘““Mrs. Piper has supernormal knowledge in her trances; but 
whether it comes from ‘ tapping the minds’ of living people or 
from some common cosmic reservoir of memories, or from 
surviving ‘spirits’ of the departed is a question impossible 
for me to answer just now to my own satisfaction. The 
spirit theory is undoubtedly not only the most natural, but 
the simplest, and I have great respect for Hodgson’s and 
Hyslop’s arguments when they adopt it. At the same time 
the electric current called belief has not yet closed in my 
mind.” * 


* Dated April 21, 1907, Letters of William James,'2: 287. Cf. Collected 
Essays, etc., p. 490. 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 149 


Why did this electric current not close in James’s mind? 
With his readiness to find truth in the novel and the uncon- 
ventional why was James left unconvinced by the same kind 
of evidence which had satisfied some of his colleagues? It 
could not have been on account of any a priori objection to 
finding proofs for immortality in this field. James was per- 
fectly willing to examine any messages which purported to 
come from his friends. It is interesting to know, also, that 
James did as Myers and Hodgson had done before him, and 
said that he would communicate after death if he were able. 
But although many mediums have published messages which 
claimed to come from him, those who knew James _inti- 
mately and who have examined the messages say that nothing 
which could possibly be considered authentic has ever been 
received. 

Yet though James had no a priori objection to receiving or 
giving messages in this fashion, he seems to have had an a 
posteriori objection to believing that his friends were leading 
the kind of life which these “ spirit-returns ” claimed to re- 
veal. The picture they drew of an attenuated sort of existence 
and confused mental processes was not either a pleasant or a 
convincing one. Previous investigators had explained that the 
messages were conveyed through the subconsciousness of the 
medium and were confused and thinned-out in transit. But 
the suggestion is not a wholly plausible one. Unclear lines of 
communication cannot explain banality. James recognized the 
seriousness of this objection and commented on it by saying: 
“The spirit-hypothesis exhibits a vacancy, triviality and in- 
coherence of mind painful to think of as the state of the de- 
parted; and coupled therewithal a disposition to ‘fish’ and 
face round, and disguise the essential hollowness, which are, 
if anything, more painful still.” * 

Here as so often in James the personal and intimate feel- 
ing, the “ passionate vision ” which suggests the philosophical 
position, has close affinity with the religious view. It is im- 
possible not to feel that James rejected the immortality sug- 


8 Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 438. 


150 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


gested by psychical research partly because it did not satisfy 
his sense for the religiously appropriate. For James religion 
was a means to more abundant living just as ethics was a call 
to the satisfaction of the greatest number of legitimate human 
desires. To harmonize with the demands of his robust religious 
faith a conception of immortality would be forced to postulate 
a richer and more complete life than the present, not the im- 
poverished one suggested by the mediums. James seems in- 
deed to have found much that was revolting in his psychical 
research and to have been correspondingly disinclined to look 
to it for light on such a problem as that of life after death. 
He once remarked on “the cabinet, the darkness, the tying, 
suggesting a sort of human rat-hole life,’ ° and again on the 
fact that these phenomena are “ smothered in the mass of 
their degenerative congeners,” '° while in one of his unpub- 
lished letters he calls his contact with mediums “a strange and 
in many ways a disgusting experience.” 

The supernormal knowledge in the minds of mediums James 
thus found interesting in itself but not finally suggestive as 
to immortality. The other interest mentioned above, however, 
seems to have occupied his mind for a considerable period of 
time. That was the interest in the possibility of the existence 
of a spiritual environment of consciousness connecting all in- 
dividual lives in one great cosmic continuum. Frequent ref- 
erences are made to this idea in James’s works, but in most 
of the places where it is mentioned it is applied, as we have 
observed before, not so much to the problem of immortality 
as to the question of the nature of God. 

The application of this conception to the problem of life 
after death is made most specifically in the Ingersoll lecture 
on Human Immortality. Here James combats the notion that 
to make thought a function of the brain is to make it depend 
exclusively on the brain. Consciousness may be a function of 
the brain in one of two senses. It may be produced by the 
brain or it may pre-exist and receive from the brain merely 
its form. The latter alternative has an interesting bearing on 

9 Memories and Studies, p. 197. 1° Proceedings Eng. S. P. R. 18: 33. 


~~" ae 


OF WILLIAM FAMES I51 


the problem of immortality. The whole material realm may 
be “a mere surface-veil of phenomena, hiding and keeping 
back the world of genuine realities.” It may be that, as Shel- 
ley suggests, 


Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity. 


This means that certain parts of the phenomenal world may 
be more permeable than others, and at these parts “‘ gleams, 
however finite and unsatisfying, of the absolute life of the 
universe, are from time to time vouchsafed.” Our brains may 
be these translucent places. They may be the individualizing 
organs by which the cosmic consciousness is divided into 
finite streams of thought. If this were the case consciousness 
would be dependent upon the brain in a sense, but the brain’s 
function would be transmissive, not productive. The brain 
would exercise a regulative influence, arranging and giving 
form to thought, at the same time that it helped partially to 
obscure the divine effulgence. 

A beautifully symbolic passage expressing the same idea is 
found in the article entitled ‘“‘ Final Impressions of a Psychical 
Researcher.” “. . . we with our lives are like islands in the 
sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may 
whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and 
Newport hear each other’s foghorns. But the trees also com- 
mingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the 
islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just 
so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against 
which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into 
which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reser- 
voir. Our ‘normal’ consciousness is circumscribed for adap- 
tation to our external earthly environment, but the fence 
is weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak 
Tae hd 


Another unpublished letter to Davidson is interesting here: 


11 Memories and Studies, p. 204. 


152 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


CAMBRIDGE, 
October 20, 1898 


Dear Thomas: 


If you had the slightest spark of scientific imagination you 
would see that the mother sea is of a glutinous consistency 
and when she strains off portions of her being through the 
dome of many colored glass, they stick so tenaciously that 
she must shake herself hard to get rid of them. 

Then, as there is no action without reaction, the shake is 
felt by both members, and remains registered in the mother 
sea like a “stub” in a check book, preserving memory of the 
transaction. These stubs form the basis of the immortal ac- 
count which we begin when the prismatic dome is shattered. 

These matters, you see, are ultra simple, and would be re- 
vealed to you if you had a more humble and teachable heart. 
Your whole lot of idle and captious questions proceed so ob- 
viously from intellectual pride, and are so empty of all true 
desire for instruction that I will not pretend to reply to them 
at all. I am glad that my poor little book took them out of 
you, though. You must feel the better for having expressed 
them. 

I have sent the letter to Alice, who is in the country having 
a chimney, alas! rebuilt. 
| In great haste, 

Yours affectionately, 
WILLIAM JAMES 


On the whole James seems to have found the conception of 
a great “‘ mother-sea ” of consciousness most fruitful when 
applied to other religious problems than that of immortality. 
Even in the Ingersoll lecture where immortality was the topic 
under discussion he arrived at conclusions which were not 
wholly satisfactory either to himself or to his hearers. In- 
deed, so many criticisms were received after the publication 
of the lecture in book form that James was forced to write a 
preface to the second edition admitting that the theory did 
not necessarily provide for personal individual immortality 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 153 


and that it merely lent itself to such an interpretation along 
with other possible alternatives. As a matter of fact, his whole 
study of psychical phenomena he found not only unconvincing, 
but hardly even suggestive. ‘‘ For twenty-five years,” he once 
wrote, “I have been in touch with the literature of psychical 
research. . . . Yet I am theoretically no ‘ further’ than I was 
at the beginning.” *” 

More fruitful was the more personal approach to the prob- 
lem through the demands of the moral and religious conscious- 
ness. In the second half of the Ingersoll lecture James drops 
the point of view of the scientist and turns from the discus- 
sion of a psycho-physical theory to take up an argument 
based on human desire and its right to be satisfied. His way 
of introducing the question is indeed a little startling. We 
must not be prejudiced against the idea of immortality, James 
here says, on account of any fear we may have that Heaven 
will be overcrowded with undesirable citizens! Surely only in 
a truly “ Brahmin ” environment could such a proposition be 
seriously set forth! Yet James seems to have been half in 
earnest about it. The idea of value at the bottom of his ethi- 
cal theory shows that he had a hatred of the commonplace, 
and that the notion of spending eternity surrounded by medi- 
ocrity would have been repulsive to him. James often used to 
remark, Professor George Herbert Palmer has told the pres- 
ent writer, ‘‘ Heaven would be an awfully crowded place! ” 
But the conclusion to which the argument of the lecture leads 
is as characteristic as is this outburst. Just as he had written 
elsewhere that the cardinal sin is blindness to the significance 
of other lives than one’s own, so here he refers again to Steven- 
son’s “ The Lantern Bearers ” and comments that we who miss 
the inner joy of these alien lives miss all. Consistently with 
the position taken in his ethics that every desire has a right 
to be fulfilled except as it conflicts with other desires, James 
argues here that our indifference to another’s yearning for 
immortality is no evidence of the unreality of that yearning 
nor against its right to be satisfied. And the fundamentally 


12 Memories and Studies, pp. 174-5. 


154 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


religious character of his argument is shown by his reference 
to the desires of the Deity as a court of last appeal. ‘‘ The 
Universe, with every living entity which her resources cre- 
ate, creates at the same time a call for that entity, and 
an appetite for its continuance —creates it, if nowhere 
else, within the heart of the entity itself.” It is ab- 
surd to suppose that “in the heart of infinite being 
itself there can be such a thing as plethora, or glut, or super- 
saturation.” ** 

Some of the most interesting and pointed utterances are 
found, however, outside the Ingersoll lecture. A few of them 
seem to reveal the deepest searchings of his own heart. Many 
of them are vague and not at all positive in tone. But, to use 
James’s own expression, “‘ weak sticks make strong faggots,” 
and the total impression which they convey when grouped 
together is of a strong undercurrent of feeling on James’s own 
part. A twofold division may be made here similar to that 
which we have seen should be made in his religious philoso- 
phy as a whole. At times James wants and believes in immor- 
tality for the sake of more activity, while at other times the 
need for comfort and assurance is paramount. 

As an example of the former attitude the following may be 
cited from the Principles of Psychology: ‘The demand for 
immortality is nowadays essentially teleological. We believe 
ourselves immortal because we believe ourselves fit for im- 
mortality.” So even a “stream of consciousness ” should be 
immortal if it can believe itself “fit” to be, for 

‘““A ‘substance’ ought surely to perish, we think, if not 
worthy to survive, and an insubstantial ‘stream’ to prolong 
itself, provided it be worthy, if the nature of Things is organ- 
ized in the rational way in which we trust it is. Substance or no 
substance, soul or ‘ stream,’ what Lotze says of immortality is 
about all that human wisdom can say: 

““* We have no other principle for deciding it than this gen- 
eral idealistic belief: that every created thing will continue 
whose continuance belongs to the meaning of the world, and so 


13 “ Human Immortality,” p. 40. Cf. Collected Essays, etc., p. 132. 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES Iss 


long as it does belong; whilst every one will pass away whose 
reality is justified only in a transitory phase of the world’s 
course.’ — Metaphysik, Sec. 245.” ** 

With this published in 1890 it is interesting to compare 
James’s replies in 1904 to the questionnaire sent out by Pro- 
fessor J. B. Pratt: 


Q. Do you believe in personal immortality? 
A. Never keenly; but more strongly as I grow older. 


QO. If so, why? 
A. Because I am just getting fit to live.*® 


A remark made by James referring to Professor F. J. 
Child fits in with this train of thought: ‘I have often said 
that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was 
the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child 
ite: 16 

Of the second group, where the longing for assurance domi- 
nates, one of the earliest recorded is found in a letter to his 
father after he had received word that the latter’s death was 
imminent. Under date of December 14, 1882, he writes from 
London: 

‘“‘ We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your 
being taken away from us, especially during the past ten 
months, that the thought that this may be your last illness 
conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you’ve 
given your message to the world in many ways and will not 
be forgotten; you are left here alone, and on the other side, 
let us hope and pray, dear, dear old Mother is waiting for 
you to join her. If you go, it will not be an inharmonious 
thing. . . . In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the 
present soon will fall and go back and back, yours is still for 
me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from 
you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expres- 

14 Principles of Psychology, 1: 348-0. 


BOL LETLCTS, 22 214; 
16 Proc. Amer. S. P. R. 1909, p. 580. 


156 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


sion thereof, I’m sure there’s a harmony somewhere, and that 
our strivings will combine. . . . As for the other side, and 
Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I can’t say anything. 
More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that were true, 
all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over 
me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and ex- 
presses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of 
bidding an ordinary good-night.” ”” 

Nine years later he was writing to his sister in similar cir- 
cumstances, and in the course of his letter he alluded to the 
relation of psychological investigation to his father’s Sweden- 
borgian belief: 

‘“,.. Your fortitude, good spirits and unsentimentality 
have been simply unexampled in the midst of your physical 
woes; and when you’re relieved from your post, just that bright 
note will remain behind, together with the inscrutable and 
mysterious character of the doom of nervous weakness which 
has chained you down for all these years. As for that, there’s 
more in it than has ever been told to so-called science. These 
inhibitions, these split-up selves, all these new facts that are 
gradually coming to light about our organization, these en- 
largements of the self in trance, etc., are bringing me to turn 
for light in the direction of all sorts of despised spiritualistic 
and unscientific ideas. Father would find in me today a much 
more receptive listener — all that philosophy has got to be 
brought in. And what a queer contradiction comes to the ordi- 
nary scientific argument against immortality (based on body 
being mind’s condition and mind going out when body is 
gone), when one must believe (as now, in these neurotic 
cases) that some infernality in the body prevents really ex- 
isting parts of the mind from coming to their effective rights 
at all, suppresses them, and blots them out from participation 
in this world’s experiences, although they are there all the 
time. When that which is you passes out of the body, I am 
sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life 
till then eclipsed and kept down.” *® 


17 Letters, 1: 219-220. 18 Letters, I: 310-311. 


OF WILLIAM AMES 157 


Here and there the reader finds hints that the notion of a 
future life was one upon which James’s mind often dwelt. 
For example, one letter mentions the death of John Ropes, 
then turns to other matters, and then at the end of the letter 
says: “‘ John Ropes, more than most men, seems as if he would 
be natural to meet again.” *® And in a letter to his son, speak- 
ing of scenery he says: ‘‘I have often been surprised to find 
what a predominant part in my own spiritual experience it has 
played, and how it stands out as almost the only thing the 
memory of which I should like to carry over with me beyond 
the veil, unamended and unaltered.” *° 

In the memorial address for Francis Boott now printed in 
Memories and Studies there are some beautiful passages con- 
cluding with the words: “ Good-by, then, old friend. We shall 
nevermore meet the upright figure, the blue eye, the hearty 
laugh, upon these Cambridge streets. But in that wider world 
of being of which this little Cambridge world of ours forms so 
infinitesimal a part, we may be sure that all our spirits and 
their missions here will continue in some way to be repre- 
sented, and that ancient human loves will never lose their 
own.” 

Suggestive also is the testimony of a group of unpublished 
letters recently found. They were written by James to a cousin, 
Mrs. Kitty James Prince, at a time when she was living at 
the home of President Julius H. Seelye of Amherst College. 
In several of them James refers to the Society for Psychical 
Research, and in one he asks: ‘ Will President Seelye join 
this ghost investigating society? ’’ Quotation is made here 
from some of the letters which reflect James’s interest in 
immortality, the entire letter being given in some cases on 
account of its interest. 

The first two contain references to James’s work on his 
father’s writings published in the fall of 1884 as The Literary 
Remains of Henry James. 


19 Letters, 2: 109. ee fF hy Se 


‘158 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


15 ApPIAN Way 


; CAMBRIDGE, Mass. 
Dictated Oct. 20th (1884) 


My dearest Kitty 


All summer long I deferred writing to you because I ex- 
pected to pay you a visit toward the end of September. When 
that time came however I found I had just enough money to 
bring me home from the Adirondacks by way of Vermont — 
not enough to return by the Boston and Albany Road. It was 
lucky it was so for I had a fever attack immediately after my 
return which would have caught me at Amherst had I gone 
round through Albany and stayed over with you. I had three 
of them this summer, one keeping me in bed eight days, and 
the effect on my eyes etc. has not yet worn off — one more 
reason why I have not written. It was delightful to get your 
long letter the other day, and hear you speak as if in such 
good spirits— though Heaven knows, Kitty, you never let 
yourself speak otherwise however you may feel in the secret 
fastnesses. 

From not having heard from you so long I had begun to be 
a little anxious as to whether you were keeping up well. The 
place you have got in Amherst, with the friendly Mrs. Scott, 
seems indeed providential. We are embarking on what prom- 
ises to be a much easier winter than the last — the house more 
furnished, two hours less of lecturing, some pieces of work 
done which is a relief to my mind, etc., etc. —- you see the 
prospect. I succeeded during the summer in doing my part of 
the work on father’s literary remains. The book will appear 
in two or three weeks. I made a lot of extracts from his pre- 
vious writings some of which I think you will enjoy. 

My Alice will have told you all the mews such as the going 
of Alice to Europe— Bob’s being here, Howard’s histrionic 
success, etc. Bob is my amanuensis now and will add a word 
for himself. I need not tell you, dear Kitty, how often and 
with what affection I think of you. Though separated here be- 
low, we shall in that future life have many active doings to- 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 159 


gether which will last for an indefinite period. Pray give my 
best regards to the Seelyes and believe me your most affec- 
tionate 

(Signed) Wo. JAMES 


CAMBRIDGE, Dec. 24 (1884) 


My dear Kitty, 


I mailed you yesterday a copy of poor dear old Father’s 
‘“‘ Literary Remains ” which you are not bound to read if 
your head disagrees, but which I know you will like to see and 
possess. The autobiography will, however, interest you, and 
perhaps parts of the introduction, in the writing of which all 
alone here last summer I seemed to sink into an intimacy with 
Father which I had never before enjoyed. I trust he takes 
cognizance of it somewhere. Vacation began yesterday, and I 
am going for a change to N. Y. and Philadelphia, and hope to 
spend at least a week away. We are founding here a “ Society 
for Psychical Research ” under which innocent sounding name 
ghosts, second sight, spiritualism, and all sorts of hobgoblins 
are going to be “investigated” by the most high-toned and 
“‘ cultured” members of the community; and my business in 
Philadelphia is partly to confer with some of the leading 
spirits in the movement there. A society in London of the same 
name has put the evidence for these things on a most respect- 
able footing. We are all well— Alice busy-zssima with the 
housekeeping and the babes. We are thinking of building a 
house out Mount Auburn way, in which there will be a good 
room. for you whenever you please to come. The thing isn’t 
settled yet fully, but soon will be. I send you also from Alice 
a little “‘ individual ” salt and pepper caster, which she trusts 
may be useful. With warmest love, and a merry Christmas to 
you from both of us, I am ever your affectionate Cousin 


Wo. JAMES 


The next two letters refer to the loss of his infant son, Her- 
mann. 


160° RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


CAMBRIDGE, July 12, ’85 


My dear Kitty, 


Our little Humster, whom you never saw since his first 
babyhood, has also gone over to the majority. We buried him 
yesterday, under the young pine tree, at my father’s side. For 
9 days he had been in a desperate condition, but his consti- 
tution proved so tenacious, that each visit of the doctor found 
him still alive. At last his valiant little soul left the body at 
about nine o’clock on Thursday night. He was a broad, gen- 
erous, patient little nature, with a noble head who would 
doubtless have done credit to his name had he lived. It must 
be now that he is reserved for some still better chance than 
that, and that we shall in some way come into his presence 
again. The great part of the experience to me has been the 
sight of Alice’s devotion. I thought I knew her, but I didn’t, 
nor did I fully know the meaning of that old human word 
motherhood. Six weeks with no regular sleep, 9 days with 
never more than 3 hours in the 24, and yet bright and fresh 
and ready for anything as much on the last day as on the first. 
She is so essentially mellow a nature that when the excite- 
ment is gone and the collapse sets in, it will be short and have 
nothing morbid about it. We are all pretty tired, and as I 
write this, I can hardly keep my eyes open. 

We leave for Jaffrey in a day or two, little Billy staying 
here so as not to catch the whooping cough from his mother. 
He has been kept three weeks in the neighborhood of Jaffrey 
by Margaret Gibbens, and the climate doesn’t seem to agree. 
What more permanent plan for the summer we shall make, I 
don’t know, but will let you know when it is made. Dear 
Kitty, I have thought of you often, with the Angel of Death 
near by. It brings one closer to all mankind, this world old 
experience. Yours ever, with Alice’s warm love, 


WM. JAMES 


OF WILLIAM AMES 161 


Jarrrey, N. H., Aug. 11, ’85 
My dearest Kitty, 


I have been on the point of writing you every day for the 
last 12 — having been at home in Cambridge in Mrs. Gibbens’s 
house, whilst she took my place with Alice. But the divine 
afflatus kept me going on my work all the time, rousing me 
once as early as 2.30 A.M. to write, and keeping me going 
usually till 5 in the afternoon. Under these conditions, much 
as one may wish to write a letter, he generally finds that he 
can’t possibly do it today. Having come to a pause in my 
work, I came back here yesterday afternoon — Mrs. Gibbens 
had been with Alice whilst I was away —and here I am at 
my writing table. We are on a quiet farm, with two good 
people and a good table, while the 2 children are going all day 
long, in the hay wagon, in the barn or in the berry pasture, 
and drop asleep like logs at night. Alice and I jog about after 
a slow old horse in the afternoons and evenings, and it is 
good all around. Alice is enduring her loss beautifully, with- 
out a word of murmur or a bit of morbidness. It makes the 
world seem smaller and deeper and more continuous with the 
next, and I have often felt in these last days how natural a 
thing your sense of that continuity was. We have got so many 
genuine letters of sympathy that it makes one feel also how, 
under superficial disguises, men feel close together in these 
old simple human griefs, and how they make the whole world 
kin. We shall stay here till Sept. 1, then to Cambridge. I will 
in Sept. pay you my little six dollar visit — the money burns 
in my pouch! I hope dear Kitty that your summer has been 
a tolerably good one, tho’ in the absence of news I am always 
a little anxious about you. Pray send word shortly after re- 
ceipt of this. Better always address simply ‘“‘ Cambridge ” — 
letters are forwarded from there. Alice sends much love. So 
do [. Ever your 

W. J. 


The next three letters refer to losses sustained by Mrs. Prince: 


162 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


Camsr. Mch 4, ’86 
My dearest Kitty, 


Just now comes your letter with its for you fateful news. 
So indissoluble is the tie of dependency on our parents that I 
suppose, notwithstanding your poor mother’s inability to do 
anything for you during all these years, you now must have a 
feeling of unprotectedness greater than ever before. But you 
have the satisfaction of being assured that no clouds now veil 
the essence of her soul... . 


Jarrrey, N. H. 
| July 11, °86 
My dear Kitty, 

Your letter of July 3d came duly, and rejoiced us by the 
good news it brought of you all. I meant to have written long 
since to acknowledge the receipt of the box-making materials 
for Billy — which certainly proved the best present for child- 
hood I have ever seen. Billy, with some help from Harry at 
first, has succeeded in making a perfect box, and was de- 
lighted with his prowess. Our thanks are due to the painstak- 
ing benevolence of your young friend who sawed the wood and 
punched the nail holes. My not writing was due to the extreme 
multifariousness of my duties etc. You know how it was when 
you were there; well, it became tenfold worse afterwards. We 
then made a week’s visit to the S. 3 .24eP0o0r runt 
begins to feel her old age—loss of memory and so forth 
— ina rather sad and stoic fashion, and I was too fagged to 
carry on very vivacious conversation. The fall is the time for 
visiting, when one’s youth is renewed like the eagle’s by the 
vacation delights. In spring the cobwebs of the winter’s work 
are spun too thickly over one’s soul. One ought to be buried 
in the moist earth for three weeks to let that scuff all rot away, 
so that the soul may sprout again. Mine is just beginning to 
now, after a week at the sea-shore near Portsmouth, all alone 
with the waves and the pines and the bayberries, and half a 
week here on this peaceful and salubrious farm with Alice and 





OF WILLIAM FAMES 163 


the babes. I have read a lot of profane french novels — the 
first step towards cleansing my metaphysic-crammed brain, 
and am now advanced to biography. Chas. Kingsley’s life, 
were it not so long, is a book I should strongly recommend, for 
its picture of a man of intense emotional susceptibility coupled 
with great generosity of disposition and the broadest sympa- 
thies. — Of course I agree about what you say of the battle- 
fields of each individual. There will be a strange transforma- 
tion scene about the relative importance of various careers, on 
the day when the veil shall be lifted. Then indeed the last shall 
be first! —I must not forget to speak of the inscription. I 
cashed the order and have the money. But I actually have not 
had a moment of time to ascertain whether the work has yet 
been done. I shall await McNamee’s bill, and visit the spot to 
see that all is right before paying it. That probably cannot be 
before September. Meanwhile if you would like the use of the 
money drop me a card and I will send it. Otherwise I shall not 
expect to hear from you till after the middle of August. You 
had better address ‘‘ Cambridge.” Please give my love to the 
Seelyes. Alice sends you hers. 
Always your affectionate 
W. J. 


CamBr. Aug. 5, ’86 
Dearest Kitty, 


I am home for a week or so of solitary work, and yester- 
day I paid the marble-cutter’s bill, having walked the after- 
noon previous from the Newton car terminus to the cemetery 
to see whether the work had been well done. It was a splendid 
cool day, and I never knew that a place could be as beautiful 
as Newton was. It makes Cambridge look scrubby in the ex- 
treme. The inscription “‘ A new song before the throne ” looked 
beautiful, and just fitted rightly into its place. I hope the 
blessed Doctor in some way takes cognizance of its being 
there. 

We have had a splendid month at Jaffrey and are all very 


164 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


well. I have been writing since 8.30 A. M. till now, 5.45 in the 
afternoon —a good day’s work for me... . 


Is it not permissible, then, to question the statement that 
James had only a “comparatively slight interest in immor- 
tality? ’’ Does it not seem rather that he had not only an in- 
terest but a fair share of belief? May we not ask, also, if such 
a belief is not an appropriate part of James’s whole philosophic 
outlook? Immortality seems to be precisely the sort of subject 
with which the will to believe is fitted to deal. The issues here 
are living and forced and momentous. And it is an appropri- 
ate question for pragmatism to attack, for the latter is simply 
‘‘a means of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise 
would be interminable,” an “ attitude of orientation toward 
last things,” a way toward “ fruitful relations with reality,” 
and so a justification of belief in whatever is truly significant 
for an optimistic and stimulating view of life. Similarly mel- 
iorism, with its faith in a better realm for which God and men 
labor together needs a belief in immortality for its completion. 
And the whole pragmatic emphasis on the capacity of the free 
creative human spirit to effect changes in its environment 
surely hints at the possibility of its being able to survive mate- 
rial changes in that environment. Pluralism gives no assur- 
ance of immortality but the very riskiness of a pluralistic uni- 
verse makes faith in personal immortality almost essential. As 
James suggested in the letter to his father quoted above, if we 
could believe that the loose ends of this pluralistic life on 
earth were gathered together in a more abundant life here- 
after, then indeed “all would be solved and justified.”’ And it 
should be remarked that while pluralism brings the possibility 
of failure to achieve immortality it contains also the assurance 
that immortality if attained will be active and rich and cre- 
ative and, most important of all, individual. Finally empiri- 
cism, taking its stand not upon a priori grounds but upon the 
yearnings of the human heart as they make themselves felt in 
daily experience postulates immortality for the satisfaction of 
an abiding human demand. It seems not too much to say that 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 165 


James’s philosophy furnished a congenial setting for his belief 
and formed an appropriate background for the remark which 
he frequently made in his last illness, as quoted in an un- 
published letter from Mrs. James to Professor Mary W. 
Calkins of Wellesley: ‘‘ Death has come to seem a very trifling 
incident.” 


IX 
MYSTICISM 


N FREEDOM, God, and immortality we will to believe. 
To satisfy our moral and religious demands we postulate 
their existence. Any belief, in James’s view, requires an 

act of attention and so of will, but in these beliefs based on 
moral postulates instead of sense experience the active ele- 
ment is especially prominent. The belief in God, however, has 
another side. We may approach God by an act of will, but 
God on his part stoops to our weakness. In the essays pub- 
lished with The Will to Believe James had said that our power 
of moral and volitional response is probably our deepest organ 
of communication with the nature of things.’ But\in the Vari- 
eties the deepest organ of communication is the passive exper1- 
ence,” the experience of reconciliation,* when man feels the 
touch of a Power greater than himself, and when instead of 
selecting and creating his own reality he is content to contem- 
plate the Ideal as presented, finding in it a new authority and 
a new source of strength. 

The mystical is such an experience, marked off from other 
.phenomena, such as conversion, in which healing grace is seen 
at work, by the emphasis it places on the cognitive element. 
The mystical experience is primarily one of revelation. In re- 
ligion it has been accepted as bringing an immediate commu- 
nication from the Deity, while in philosophy it has been ac- 
corded a place among epistemological attempts to know the 
heart of reality. 

In James’s philosophy mysticism is of interest to us first 
of all as representing the passive tendency in what we have 
Seat. hd pact 3 P. 388, 

166 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 167 


called his religious conflict, and as aiming to fill the need for 
assurance and for a final reconciliation which we saw was 
deep-seated in one type of religious mood. Where pragmatism 
stresses the active element, mysticism gives its attention to 
the contemplative. For pragmatism’s interest in ideas and in 
truth as means, mysticism substitutes an experience of illu- 
mination which is an end in itself. And where the will to be- 
lieve suggests tentative postulates, mysticism claims to have 
access to truths that are intuitively certain. The discussion of 
mysticism in this chapter will endeavor to do two things: first, 
to set forth the mystical experience as James described it, 
giving his own view of its value and cognitive content; and 
second, to point out the close contact which the philosophy 
of mysticism makes with James’s thought as a whole by show- 
ing three places at which it offers a natural and legitimate 
supplement to his views. 

First as to James’s account of mysticism, — briefly the mys- 
tical experience may be described as an extension of the ordi- 
nary state of consciousness. As James shows so frequently, we 
have grown away from the Lockian notion that the unit of 
mental life is the “‘ idea” or is any single isolated mental ele- 
ment. In his own psychology the mental unit is the entire 
psychic state. Consciousness is a succession of these, each of 
them a unity. This is true not only of the uncompounded 
mental states described in the Principles but also of the more 
complex, “ many-in-one ” states of consciousness hinted at in_ 
A Pluralistic Universe. In either case the state itself is experi- 
enced in its wholeness. 

But although psychic states are like each other in their 
unity, they may differ greatly from each other in extent. In- 
vestigation has shown that the ‘ margin” surrounding the 
field of consciousness may vary greatly from one moment to 
another. At certain times the margin is extended, and a vast 
amount of material, usually trans-marginal, is included in con- 
sciousness. Or to use Fechner’s metaphor, at certain moments 
the “threshold ” falls and material that is ordinarily below 
the threshold comes into view. Combining this with the results 


168 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


of Myers’s researches we may say that this material which is 
ordinarily below the threshold is a part of the “ subliminal 
self.”” The material is usually swbconscious, but with the low- 
ering of the threshold it becomes conscious, —the conscious 
state is widened to include it. 

This material in the subconscious self consists largely of 
memories, — thoughts and feelings which were explicitly no- 
ticed at one time or have slipped into the marginal region 
unnoticed by the conscious attention: But James, like Myers, 
does not limit subconscious material to memory. Unlike 
Myers, however, he does not definitely suggest its extension 
telepathically into the mind of another person. We do not 
know how far it extends, but we do know that at certain times 
its content comes within the focus of consciousness and goes 
to make up the unified conscious state. 

Now the mystical, in James’s theory, is just such a psychi- 
cal state as this, when the field of consciousness has widened, 
and matters usually subliminal have come into view. As such 
it differs from the ordinary psychical state not so much in 
kind as in extent. It has nothing to do with sense-perception, 
for sense stimuli are absent, but its form is perceptual, just as 
any conscious state is perceptual in its immediacy, that is, be- 
fore the concepts have had time to get in their work. It is a 
moment of perception of a great mass of memories, concepts, 
feelings, relations, all at once, a much larger mass than the 
ordinary “rational” consciousness reveals, but still an undif- 
ferentiated one. As soon as an object in it is singled out and 
recognized and classified, the experience becomes conceptual, 
but in its much-at-once character, as it is immediately pre- 
sented and apprehended, it presents an undiscriminated per- 
ceptual field. But this is to say that it is a moment of ex- 
perience in the fullest sense of the word. It is a moment of 
unlimited possibilities, of vaguely suggested wider relation- 
ships, of illumination and exhilaration and newness of life, 
in which the personal consciousness may feel itself profoundly 
though indescribably moved and even transformed, and in 
which wholly unsuspected sources of power may make them- 
selves felt. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 169 


These states are to be distinguished from other psychical 
states, James tells us,* by their ineffability, noetic quality, 
transiency, and passivity. They are ineffable, for one must 
have direct experience of them one’s self to know what they 
are like. Yet for the one who has them they seem to have 
noetic quality, indescribable though they are, and bringing 
insight as they do into a kind of truth of which the rational 
consciousness knows nothing. At the same time they are 
transient, for their intensity is so great that they cannot be 
lasting, and they are passive, for when they come the experi- 
ent feels himself in the grip of a power not his own. 

Mysticism thus fits naturally into an empirical philosophy, 
since its approach to truth is so thoroughly experiential. 
“‘ Reason, operating on our other experiences, even our psy- 
chological experiences, would never have inferred these spe- 
cifically religious experiences in advance of their actual 
coming.” But now that they have come, empirically, “ they 
suggest that our natural experience, our strictly moralistic and 
prudential experience, may be only a fragment of real human 
experience. They soften nature’s outlines and open out the 
strangest possibilities and perspectives.” ° And mysticism is 
also radically empirical. For radical empiricism is a demand 
that the relations between terms, just as truly as the terms 
themselves, shall be matters of direct particular experience. 
And mysticism is the process of finding that the larger rela- 
tions of life, one term of which is the individual self, are 
directly experienceable. 

What then shall we say of its cognitive content? In the first 
and most important place, as a cognitive experience it is per- 
ceptual. Although in one context ° James seems to ally himself 
with the intellectualistic tradition dating back to Plato, and 
to suggest that worship of the religious object is comparable 
to the contemplation of abstract ideas, in the main he takes a 
position similar to Bergson’s intuitionism and brings out 
clearly mysticism’s perceptual character. The knowledge it 

' 4 Varieties, p. 380. 


5 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 306. 
6 Chapter III of the Varieties. 


170 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


brings is knowledge of acquaintance, not knowledge about. 
As such it has the advantage of being the kind of knowledge 
which gives insight, which goes to the heart of its object, and 
which is able to appreciate and enjoy all the color and life 
and richness which its object may have. As such also, how- 
ever, it suffers from its lack of conceptual function by being 
individual and incommunicable. It brings insight, it is intui- 
tively penetrating, it is illuminating, yet it hardly deserves 
the name of knowledge, since it is indefinable and limited to 
the individual experiencer. 

It is not limited to the individual, however, in the sense 
that it reveals only the individual’s own consciousness, his 
memory and past experience. James definitely states that it 
links the individual with a consciousness not his own. He says, 
for example, that as a result of his experience with nitrous 
oxide one conclusion forced itself upon him. “It is that our 
normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we 
call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about 
it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential 
forms of consciousness entirely different.” * The mystical, 
waking contact with a part or parts of this surrounding con- 
sciousness is an experience of illumination,* of reconcilation,° 
of exhilaration,’® and of power, “‘ new ranges of life succeed- 
ing on our most despairing moments.” ** Such experiences 
“render the soul more energetic,” *” they “add a supersensu- 
ous meaning to the outward data of consciousness.” ** And the 
whole tendency of mysticism is to incline the experiencer 
toward optimism and pantheism, to an “ anti-naturalistic ” 
and “so-called other-worldly ” state of mind.’* James’s final 
observation on the adequacy of mysticism as a means to truth 
is recorded as follows: 

(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and 

have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over 
the individuals to whom they come. 


7 Varieties, p. 388. 11 4 Pluralistic Universe, p. 305. 
8 Varieties, p. 408. 12 Varteties, p. 415. 
9 Varieties, p. 388. 13 Varieties, p. 427. 


10 Collected Essays, etc., p. 501. 14 Varieties, p. 422. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 171 


(2) No authority emanates from them which should make 
it a duty for those who stand outside of them to ac- 
cept their revelations uncritically. 

(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or 
rationalistic consciousness, based upon the under- 
standing and the senses alone. They show it to be 
only one kind of consciousness. They open out the 
possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far 
as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may 
freely continue to have faith.” 


This third conclusion is the one which James emphasizes 
and from which he goes on to record his own “ over-belief.” 
There is always the possibility that new truth may come 
through the mystical experience. ‘“ It must always remain an 
open question whether mystical states may not possibly be 
such superior points of view, windows through which the mind 
looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world.” *® This 
kind of utterance is indeed one of the most distinctive things 
about James’s whole discussion. It marks him off for example 
from those psychologists who in their study of mysticism have 
made the physiological or even the pathological element the 
significant feature, from Leuba with his “‘ Tendance a la jouis- 
sance organique” and “transe amoureuse,” ‘’ from Coe and 
his notion of muscular relaxation,‘® from Murisier and his 
theory of monoideism,— even from Delacroix, considered a 
sympathetic student of the subject, who finds that St. Teresa’s 
supposed communion with the Deity is really nothing but 
communion with her subconscious self.’* For James such a 
position is much too dogmatic. ‘‘ Just as our primary wide- 
awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of 
things material, so it is logically conceivable that zf there be 
higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psy- 

16 Varieties, pp. 422-3. 

16 Varieties, p. 428. 

17 Revue Philosophique, 54: 483, 486. 

18 The Psychology of Religion, p. 276. 


19 Cf. Chapter on “St. Teresa,” in Delacroix’s Etudes d’Histoire et de 
Psychologie du Mysticisme. 


172 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


chological condition of their doing so might be our possession 
of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to 
them.” *° “ The whole drift of my education goes to persuade 
me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out 
of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those 
other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning 
for our life also; and that although in the main their experi- 
ences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two 
become continuous at certain points, and higher energies 
filter in.” ** 

This willingness to follow the lead of mystical experiences 
in the search for truth and eagerness to find in them evidence 
of contact with a consciousness other than human is further 
brought out in two hitherto unpublished letters to Miss Ethel 
D. Puffer. In an article on “ The Loss of Personality ” printed 
in the Atlantic Monthly for February 1900 and republished 
with some changes as Chapter III of The Psychology of 
Beauty, Miss Puffer, who is now Mrs. Benjamin Alfred Howes, 
had argued that the mystical experience may be described 
in terms of the loss of those bodily sensations on which 
depends the sense of self. The feeling of selfhood and per- 
sonality results from the feelings of transition which make 
clear the distinction between objects attended to in the fore- 
ground of consciousness and the less clearly noted but inti- 
mately felt organic sensations in the background of conscious- 
ness. In the mystical experience the distinction is lost sight 
of and subject and object merge. Two of James’s letters con- 
cerning the article, although containing some irrelevant mate- 
rial, are quoted here in unabridged form on account of the 
characteristic and inimitable Jamesian quality which breathes 
through them. 


July 8, ’99 
Dear Miss Puffer 


Miunsterberg has just been telling me of your essay on Mys- 
ticism, etc. I am certain that the “ perusal” of it will be of 


20 Varieties, p. 242. 21 Varieties, p. 519. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 173 


the greatest advantage to my Gifford lectures — written as 
the latter are doomed to be in the greatest ignorance of the 
Original sources of religious life. I am sure also that I “ wisht 
to heaven”? I had known of all this before —I should have 
tried to pump you ere you went away. Meanwhile can’t you 
entrust the ms. to me for a few days? Whatever I filch from it 
won’t be “ published” in the proper sense of the word till 
yours is publisht, and then with full acknowledgment. I will 
give you a copy of the Gifford lectures in return, just think 
of that! —and I herewith send you an interesting document, 
which, however, you doubtless know already. 

Pray mail the essay immediately, for I leave here on Fri- 
day and sail Saturday. 

With cordial regards, and regrets at not having seen more 
of you (no one’s fault but my own!) I am very truly yours, 


Wo. JAMES 


CARQUEIRANNE, FRANCE, March 14, 1900 


Dear Miss Puffer 


I was most agreeably surprised a couple of weeks ago by 
the Atlantic and Smith Monthly from your hand. I had begun 
to wonder when that famous Atlantic Monthly article was 
ever going to appear. My first reaction must be to praise you 
tremendously for the mervi-ness of your thought and style. 
We have a new thorough-bred in American serious literature, 
and I for one can’t tell how far she’ll go. Candidly isn’t that 
sort of reaction the thing for which you most genuinely 
hunger and thirst —to be called simply great, without hair- 
splitting distinctions, and such like foolishness? If you were 
a man, that would be the case; and I doubt whether your be- 
ing a woman, however humble-minded, alters it much. Prof. 
Howison in California told the truth when he said to me a 
couple of years ago, in memorable words: “ J., what we phi- 
losophers really need is praise! Harris calls it “ recognition ” 
— but what it is is really praise, just bald rank praise.’’ Dear 
Howison! to tell the truth so simply! So I begin, my dear 


174 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


young lady, by acknowledging your simple greatness. You give 
the marks of great power, and I hope you will go indefinitely 
forward, writing articles as strongly reasoned and as grace- 
fully turned as the one in the Atlantic, and raising the level 
of our literature in such subjects. As for the Smith article, it 
had the same qualities, and was moreover a cri du ceur, 
from the midst of life. But of course it was of slighter con- 
tent, and doesn’t exclude the simultaneous propriety of an- 
other cry from the heart, rending the sky from life’s just 
opposite pole, from someone else. 

I read the Aflantic article with the deepest attention, be- 
cause a good deal of my poor scanty reading since I have been 
away (you have very likely heard that I have been very ill) 
has been of a mystical order, and I was curious to see how 
your formulation now appeared to fit the facts. I can’t say 
that I am convinced that it is adequate, for it seems to me 
too ultra simple. There may be new genera of consciousness 
just yawning for us to tumble into; and your attempt is to 
apply to them only such structural laws as are found in the 
ordinary genus. That, of course, may be vicious from the 
start. Nevertheless since your formulation is a first attempt 
at making articulate tracks in a field hitherto untracked, it 
must remain an integral part of the literature of the subject, 
to be taken account of by all later students thereof. I rather 
feel, myself, like leaving it in that undecided position for a 
long time to come. I don’t see why it mightn’t be a satisfac- 
tory account of many forms of rapturous immersion in truth, 
yet not of all. In some a new kind of object may swim into 
the ken, and the peculiarity of the object may not consist in 
the mere fact that the subject has vanished, though that fact 
may be included, as it is in lower raptures. I wish I could see 
my way to being as confident as you are that the feelings of 
muscular adjustment are the all in all of the sense of self. Of 
course they have much to do therewith, but why can’t there 
be substantive sensations as well? The muscular transitions 
and adaptations exist between the parts of every complex 
object, however aesthetically unified the latter may be, and 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 75 


however self-forgetful the observer. You say they don’t con- 
nect the “background ” in that case. But that suggests just 
the question: isn’t there then something substantively of the 
me in that background already, and are then the feelings of 
adjustment all alone enough? My great doubt about the whole 
business is whether a merely negative formal condition like 
the dropping out of these muscular feelings can possibly ac- 
count for the immense power and sense of new verity which 
the higher mystical experiences seem to bring to those who 
have them. They may be all folly —I certainly think they are 
for the uses of this world; but I don’t feel like closing the 
door off-hand on the notion that there may be new materials 
of consciousness altogether, lying beyond our ordinary margin, 
for which our ordinary conceptual categories are insufficient, 
and of which our words can articulate no sufficient account.* 
Nevertheless, as aforesaid, there stands your little hypothesis, 
perfectly definite and precise, challenging the judgment of 
posterity, and there I leave it, for the present. 

This letter of mine to you is a great intellectual and scrip- 
torial achievement —I am still so weak. Miinsterberg writes 
that psychology is at a low ebb this year in Radcliffe. I’m 
sorry, on every account. Does any better opening show itself 
for you? I wish I were at home with the leisure I now enjoy, 
to cultivate the philosophical-social relations that Cambridge 
affords. — But no more now, from yours most sincerely, 


Wo. JAMES 


* It strikes me that I am probably away from the mark in this point — 
you are only trying to account for the loss of self; and not for everything in 
the mystical experiences by that loss. 


It is clear therefore that James was inclined to regard. the 
mystical experience as significant and helpful in the search 
for truth. It may and probably does put us in touch with 
other forms of consciousness with which our present categories 
are ill equipped to deal but which we have a right to call by 
the name of God. It is an experience of illumination, exhilara- 
tion, and power, perceptual in form, authoritative for the one 


176 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY — 


who has it, but exerting no authority over anyone else, a legiti- 
mate basis, however, for an over-belief. 

So much for the value that James himself definitely ascribes 
to the mystical experience. Now let us take up some of the 
points of contact which mysticism as worked out in the lives 
and the ideas of its greatest exponents makes with James’s 
philosophy. Our argument is that in three ways mysticism 
offers a natural and legitimate solution for problems with 
_which James was confronted. In the first place, it has a solu- 
tion for the religious conflict; secondly, it supplements the 
phenomenalism of James’s pragmatism; third, it relieves the 
individualism of his ethical theory. 

First, then, as to the conflict. We have seen that James em- 
phasizes the passive side of the mystical experience, yet his- 
torically mysticism has been more than passive.\James’s prob- 
lem, we remember, was to know which is better, deeper and 
truer, an attitude which finds the last word in creative human 
achievement, or that which sees that “ healthy-mindedness is 
not the whole of life” and reaches out for something which 
human effort cannot bring. We saw that James solved the 
difficulty in a manner only partially satisfactory even to him- 
self by the paradoxical idea of a pluralistic universe. Since 
the world is a universe it is able to respond to our need for 
stability, but since it is pluralistic it affords scope for our 
creative activity as well. God is the author of saving experi- 
ences, and to that extent is dependable, yet he is limited, and 
needs man’s aid in carrying his purposes to fruition. It is clear 
that a reconciliation of the two demands is difficult. If the 
-universe is to be safe it cannot at the same time be risky. 
There cannot be a real possibility of loss and at the same time 
an assurance of final salvation. 

We do seem, in other words, to reach a dilemma when we 
try to formulate a theory which will do justice to both the 
demands which James makes. But the mystic attacks the 
problem from the practical side. The great mystics have al- 
ways been able to reconcile the experienced need for human 
effort with the also experienced dependence on a source higher 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 177 


than human by recognizing the supplementary parts played 
by the active and the contemplative moods. The mystic has 
always insisted on a strenuously moral preparation for the 
ecstatic experience. Thus an experience which in itself is pas- 
sive is preceded by vigorous, active effort, and leads again to 
energetic effort in the “ mystic life” of active well-doing 
which always follows. Each taken by itself is insufficient, but 
when the two supplement each other the mystic finds that the 
goal of life has been achieved. No writer on mysticism has 
brought this out more suggestively than Professor W. E. 
Hocking in his book on The Meaning of God in Human Ex- 
perience. The principle of alternation, this author indicates, 
is normal not merely for the mystic, but for everyone. Alter- 
nation lies deep in the nature of things. The will to work and 
the will to worship reinforce each other. Attention must be 
directed at times to the particular things of daily experience 
and at other times to the source and background from which 
experience itself issues. Martha and Mary each play a desir- 
able and necessary part. As Havelock Ellis expresses it, in 
The Dance of Life, rhythm marks all of life’s physical and 
spiritual manifestations. Longfellow’s ‘“‘ Legend Beautiful” in 
Tales of a Wayside Inn symbolizes this truth with sympathy 
and skill in its story of the monk who left a vision of the Mas- 
ter at the call of the bell to distribute alms, and who returning, 
disconsolate, to. what he supposed was his deserted room was 
greeted, to his immeasurable surprise and joy, by his Master 
with the words: ‘“‘ Hadst thou stayed, I must have fled.” 

‘It is interesting to find that James himself discovered in the 
mystical experience a hint as to the need for satisfying both 
the active and the passive moods. In the chapter on Mysti- 
cism in the Varieties he stresses passivity as a characteristic 
of the mystical state,” emphasizes its monistic background,”* 
and brings out its message of comfort and assurance.” But 
in his article on Benjamin Paul Blood, now reprinted in 
Memories and Studies he calls that writer a pluralistic mystic, 
stressing the independence which the mystical experience 


22 P. 381. 28 P, Aro. 24 P. 428. 


178 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


brings. And in a little known because unsigned review of 
Blood’s The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Phi- 
losophy printed in the Atlantic Monthly* he emphasizes the 
part that volition must play in any religious experience worthy 
of the name. “ Interpretation of the phenomenon which Mr. 
Blood describes,” he here says, “‘is yet deficient. But we may 
be sure of one thing now: that even on the hypothesis of its 
containing all the ‘revelation’ he asserts, laughing-gas intoxi- 
cation would not be a final way of getting at that revelation. 
What blunts the mind and weakens the will is no full channel 
for truth, even if it assist us to a view of a certain aspect of it, 
and mysticism versus mysticism, the faith that comes of willing, 
the intoxication of moral volition, has a million times better 
credentials.” 

Mysticism, then, even on James’s own statement, offers a 
fruitful suggestion toward a solution of the conflict by which 
he was troubled. The second connection which it makes with 
his religious philosophy is its suggestion as to a release from 
the phenomenalism of his religious pragmatism. Pragmatism, 
as James describes it, is avowedly positivistic. Truth is a 
matter of definitely experienceable workings; it is determined 
by its empirical consequences; at times James even says it is 
the consequences themselves. Men live by postulates rather 
than by certainties. Even when they have hold of a certainty 
they do not know it to be such. The case against pragmatism 
in this regard as a philosophy of religion has been put by 
Professor James B. Pratt in his book What is Pragmatism? 
when he argues that the “logical outcome of pragmatism 
when applied to religion is not salvation from philosophic 
doubt, but a necessary and ineradicable skepticism.” *° For 
‘since the truth of an idea means merely the fact that the 
idea works, that fact is all you mean when you say the idea 
is true, nothing more, nothing ‘transcendent’ or ‘ cosmic’ 
must be sought for it.” °* And “‘’tis idle for us creatures of a 
day who cannot even mean anything beyond our own experi- 
ence, to spend time on questions necessarily so remote and in- 


25 Vol. 34, p. 628. 26 P. 205. 27 P. 206. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 179 


accessible as are those which religious people think they are 
discussing and about which they think they care.’ ** 

With all the truth which this statement of the limitations 
of pragmatism as a philosophy of religion contains, it appears 
also to be true that mysticism as James treats it affords a way 
out of pragmatic phenomenalism, and a way which is jus- 
tified by pragmatism itself. For pragmatism relies for the com- 
pletion of its process of verification on a perceptual experi- 
ence, an experience of immediacy, a face-to-face presentation.” 

Now this immediate, perceptual experience may be a sense- 
experience, but it need not be. It seems entirely fair to James’s 
thought to claim that it may be a mystical experience. To be 
sure, the mystical experience has nothing to do with sense- 
perception, for sense stimuli are absent. But its form is per- 
ceptual, just as any mental state is perceptual in its imme- 
diacy before the discriminating and classifying processes have 
had time to begin. That James regarded it so and that he 
considered it as legitimate a perceptual experience for the 
individual as a sense experience seems to be clear from the 
chapter on Mysticism in the Varieties and from the article 
“A Suggestion About Mysticism.” And his way of treating 
the whole subject of perception is at times strikingly similar 
to the treatment of the mystical experience by the mystics 
themselves. Like a religious man speaking of the Deity, James 
says of perceptual objects of acquaintance, ‘‘ At most I can 
say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain 
ways, and these objects will probably come.” *° And again he 
talks as though in a mystical strain when he says: ‘‘ The maxi- 
mal conceivable truth in an idea would seem to be that it 
should lead to an actual merging of ourselves with the object, 
to an utter mutual confluence and identification.” ** 

Yet when all is said the feeling persists that there is a dis- 
crepancy between the perceptions of the mystic and the kind 
of perceptual verification for which pragmatism is looking, a 


28 P. 208. 

29 Cf. esp. the first two essays in The Meaning of Truth. 
30 Principles of Psychology 1: 221. 

31 The Meaning of Truth, p. 156, 


180 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


discrepancy which mystics and pragmatists have vied with 
each other to point out. One chief reason for this seems to be 
the contrast between pragmatism’s social point of view, and 
mysticism’s individualism. Mysticism does indeed reach out 
beyond the phenomenal world, but the mystic himself is the 
only one who feels the direct touch with the noumenal Object. 
Ethically pragmatism is a philosophy of social amelioration; 
epistemologically it requires social verification. But the mys- 
tic’s truth exists for him alone. The mystic is indeed invulner- 
able, but it is a lonely kind of invulnerability. 

This brings us face to face with one of the central questions 
of James’s theory of knowledge. On the one hand we have the 
will to believe with its hypotheses about life and destiny, mak- 
ing postulates which are tentative, offering something to live 
by, but adopting an agnostic attitude toward ultimate cer- 
tainty. Allied to this is the pragmatic tendency to think of 
truth as known and even conditioned by its value, dependent 
for whatever being it may have on the “ working ” of partic- 
ular experiences. On the other hand we have James’s descrip- 
tion of the thorough-going, though lonely, certainty of the 
mystic, and his obvious sympathy with the whole mystical- 
perceptual procedure. And in A Pluralistic Universe we find 
him accepting Bergson as an ally, and adopting with enthu- 
siasm Bergson’s notion of a perceptual intuition by which 
reality, even ultimate cosmic reality, is grasped by a stroke 
of intuitive sympathy. 

Is it possible to bridge this chasm, and to have certainty 
which is yet socially available? It seems to be possible, even 
on James’s own statement of the case. One of his earlier 
works, the essay on ‘‘ The Sentiment of Rationality ” contains 
this passage: “. . . however vaguely a philosopher may define 
the ultimate universal datum, he cannot be said to leave it 
unknown to us so long as he in the slightest degree pretends 
that our emotional or active attitude toward it should be of 
one sort rather than another. He who says ‘ life is real, life is 
earnest,’ however much he may speak of the fundamental 
mysteriousness of things, gives a distinct definition to that 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 181 


mysteriousness by ascribing to it the right to claim from us 
the particular mood called seriousness, — which means the 
willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. 
The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. For inde- 
finable as the predicate ‘ vanity’ may be im se, it is clearly 
something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from suffer- 
ing, to be our rule of life. There can be no greater incongruity 
than for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that 
the substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that 
the thought of it should inspire us with awe, reverence, and 
a willingness to add our co-operative push in the direction 
toward which its manifestations seem to be drifting. The un- 
knowable may be unfathomed, but if it make such distinct 
demands upon our activity we surely are not ignorant of its 
essential quality.” *? 

When it is a question of the ultimate datum, then, a defini- 
tion is possible. A reaction which calls for a certain emotional 
or active attitude toward life is itself a definition and commu- 
nicable. But the mystic reaches just such an ultimate datum, 
on James’s own showing in another part of the same essay.** 
And the history of mysticism bears out the fact that the mystic 
does not rest content with his intuition, but spends his life 
trying to translate it into an ‘‘ emotional or active attitude.” 
He defines the Object of his vision by the attitude toward life 
which he takes. By so doing he communicates and socializes 
his experience. And the active attitude in its turn influences 
the vision itself.** 

As a matter of common observation, the truly religious 
man is always translating his vision into action and the true 
mystic has always transmitted to others the content of his 
experience in terms of conduct. Indeed it was James himself 
who argued in the Varieties that most men get their religious 
experience at second hand, and that the deities whom they 
worship “are known to them only in idea,” that many men 


82 The Will to Believe and Other Essays, p. 86. 
33 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 74. 
84 Cf. The Will to Believe, etc., bottom p. 60, 


182 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


are Christians, though few have had an immediate vision of 
the Savior. The common experience of mankind bears out the 
theory of the social quality of mysticism and supports the 
claim that mysticism furnishes a legitimate means of escape 
from the positivistic side of pragmatism. 

The final contribution offered by mysticism is to James’s 
ethical theory. As we saw above, in the essay on “ The Moral 
Philosopher and the Moral Life ” James makes the point that 
obligation must be understood in terms of desire and that the 
essence of good is to ratify demand. But since all demands 
cannot be satisfied at once our practical aim can only be to 
fill as many as possible of the more permanent ones. And we 
can best accomplish this by taking experience as it comes in- 
stead of relying on a priori rules. In his enthusiasm for the 
empirical attitude in ethics James makes one of the strongest 
defenses of the radical ever penned. “In point of fact,” he 
argues, ‘‘ there are no absolute evils, and there are no non- 
moral goods; and the highest ethical life — however few may 
be called to bear its burdens—consists at all times in the 
breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual 
case. There is but one unconditional commandment, which is 
that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so 
to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total 
universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can 
help; but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions 
are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the 
moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a 
unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized 
and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always 
a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate 
previous rule exists.” *° 

But how and when are we to know whether our piercing in- 
tuitions really pierce? Do they bring with them anything by 
which we may know their authority? Here once more the 
mystic offers his aid. Just as James’s empirical philosophy at- 
tains greater sureness by following its empiricism through, and 

8° The Will to Believe, etc., p. 209. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 183 


finding a noumenal realm which is at the same time an object 
of direct experience, so the cure for an individualistic and 
pluralistic ethics seems to be more pluralism of a religious sort. 
For pluralistic mysticism, in its own paradoxical way, gives the 
individual an independence which brings its own authority. 
This seems to be the message of that arresting writer, B. P. 
Blood, mentioned above. 

And even if he reject the title ‘ pluralistic’ the mystic is 
still of service here. For the mystic has his own intimate 
touch with reality, bringing, as he believes, a higher than 
human authority. He has his own “ piercing intuitions ” which 
he has always trusted as against the authority of tradition. 
He is a “ radical who confronts the existing order not with the 
intent of pure destruction but with a new standard of what 
human nature really needs.” ** The mystic can break with cus- 
tom because he is a man who knows what he is about. His is 
“a deliberate undertaking to recover the principle of value 
self-consciously.” *7 As Jesus observed in the story reported 
in Codex Bezae of the conversation with the man working on 
the Sabbath: ‘If thou knowest what thou art doing, blessed 
art thou; but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed and a 
transgressor of the law.” This is just the issue which the 
mystic feels equipped to meet. He does know what he is doing, 
and he knows that his authority is greater than that of any 
external law. The mystic, in a word, transcends the average. 
Out of the riches of his abundant life he creates new truth and 
new value. His prophetic insight is greater in degree but simi- 
lar in kind to that of James’s empirical, creative individual 
who is able to envisage the highest values in any given human 
situation. And the activity to which he is led by his confidence 
in his own inner authority has ever served to demonstrate to 
his fellows the practicability of the new truth he has discov- 
ered. His basis for judgment between conflicting desires has 
proved acceptable. He knows whereof he speaks. 

In these three ways, then, do we find mysticism making a 


4 


86 C. A. Bennett, “A Philosophical Study of Mysticism,” p. 174. 
87 [bid., p. 40. 


184 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


connection with James’s thought. The connection is illuminat- 
ing in both directions. Mysticism, it would seem, cannot be, as 
some regard it, merely a philosophy of the abnormal if its 
relation is so close to the thought of a healthy humanist like 
James. And correspondingly the religious element in James’s 
thought must be fundamental if the points of contact are so 
many. Yet is this not what one would expect, if religion be a 
natural human attitude and activity? 


Xx 
FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS 


UR study of James’s religious philosophy in its at- 
tempt to throw new light on his religious conflict, 
his developing conception of God, his belief in im- 
mortality, the relation of his mystical bent to his pragmatism 
and to his philosophy in general, has necessarily devoted itself 
to some parts of his religious Weltanschauung to the exclusion 
of others. For a well rounded view these other elements must 
at least receive mention. This chapter will accordingly take 
up: first, some of James’s general definitions of religion; sec- 
ond, some of his more specific religious interests; and third, 
a few characteristics of his personal religious belief. 

In the second chapter of the Varieties (which we know, 
from the Letters,’ caused him a good deal of trouble to com- 
pose) James addressed himself to the task of defining religion. 
His very first statement is rather discouragingly negative. 
“‘ The word ‘ religion,’ ” he says, “‘ cannot stand for any single 
principle or essence, but is rather a collective name.” ? This 
remark has frequently been quoted as the wild and destruc- 
tive vagary of an ultra-pluralist. Religion has no essence, re- 
ligious phenomena have nothing in common, therefore religion, 
having no distinctive qualities, cannot itself be anything — so 
the critics have argued. Yet it is easy to see that by this state- 
ment James simply meant to prepare the way for an empirical 
investigation. Indeed he goes on to say, ‘‘ Let us not fall im- 
mediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us 
rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find 

RUE haa. 


185 


186 RELIGION IN THE ’PHILOSOPHT 


no one essence, but many characters which may alternately 
be equally important in religion.” * We may find no common 
essence, that is, in the sense that we may find varying features 
of religion alternating in importance. That James did find 
such an alternation himself our study of the conflict has sug- 
gested. Especially unwarranted does the fear of the critics 
seem when in the next to the last chapter of the book we find 
the question: “Is there, under all the discrepancies of the 
creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony 
unanimously? ” And the answer is affirmative: ‘‘ The warring 
gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel 
each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which 
religions all appear to meet.’”?* But this common experience 
of deliverance need not come to all persons in the same way 
at the same time. ‘‘ No two of us have identical difficulties, 
nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. 
... 980 a ‘god of battles’ must be allowed to be a god for 
one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and home the 
god for another.” ° 

After this relativistic insistence a definition will be difficult. 
Affirming that for his purposes religion must have to do with 
“the inner dispositions of man himself” rather than with in- 
stitutions, James formulates the following: ‘‘ Religion, there- 
fore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us 
the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their 
solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in 
relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” ° The in- 
dividualism of this definition has received unfavorable com- 
ment. Yet religion is a matter of individual experience just 
as truly as it is a social institution. So far has the pendulum 
swung toward the socialized view among students of religion 
that James’s insistence on the reality of religious values in 
the life of the individual seems like a return to the point of 
view of common sense. The social aspect of religious prac- 
tises must be studied, by all means, but it should be combined 


3 Letters, italics ours. 5 Varieties; p. 487, ci: Dp. 75,6133; 55: 
# Pp. 507-8. SPaaT, 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 187 


with an analysis of what religion means to the individual, 
aspiring human spirit — the analysis that James has so com- 
petently given us.’ 

The word “divine” needs further explanation. James’s 
comment here is “ Whatever . . . were most primal and en- 
veloping and deeply true might at this rate be treated as god- 
like, and a man’s religion might thus be identified with his 
attitude, whatever it might be, towards what he felt to be the 
primal truth.” * But this requires still further qualification. 
Religion is a man’s total reaction upon life. May we, then, 
call any total reaction a religion? James thinks not, for to 
do so would offend our sense of the fitness of things. Voltaire’s 
sneering attitude toward life: has a certain robustness, but we 
should hardly call it religious. Similarly we should hesitate to 
apply the term to the ‘ dandified despair” of Renan’s later 
years.° Again, James has often used the expression “ religious 
melancholy,” but melancholy, as he goes on to show, “ for- 
feits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus Aurelius’s 
racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming 
after the fashion of a sacrificed pig.” *° “‘ There must be some- 
thing solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we 
denominate as religious. . . . The divine shall mean for us 
only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to 
respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor 
a jest.” ** And to distinguish the religious from the moral atti- 
tude we must add the sense of victory and consciousness of 
new resources of power. “If religion is to mean anything 
definite for us . . . we ought to take it as meaning this added 
dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in 
regions where morality strictly so-called can at best but bow 
its head and acquiesce.” “ Religion thus makes easy and 
felicitous what in any case is necessary.” ** So, including both 
volitional and intellectual elements specifically, and the emo- 
tional implicitly, James sums up his discussion by saying: 


7 Cf. Hopkins, The Origin and Evolution of Religion, pp. 6 ff. 
cid ple Fb 11 [bid., p. 38. 
8 Cf. Collected Essays, etc., pp. 36-39. 12 P, 48. 
10 Varieties, p. 38. 48. PSST; 


188 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


‘Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the 
broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that 
it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that 
our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves 
thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious atti- 
tude in the soul.” ** 

The emotional attitude of passive dependence which is so 
prominent throughout the Varieties receives more explicit no- 
tice in the characterizations of religious beliefs given in the 
chapter on ‘‘ Conclusions.” 

‘Summing up in the broadest possible way the character- 
istics of the religious life, as we have found them, it includes 
the following beliefs: — 


1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual uni- 
verse from which it draws its chief significance. 

2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher uni- 
verse is our true end; 


3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof 
—hbe that spirit ‘God’ or ‘law’—jis a process 
wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows 
in and produces effects, psychological or material, 
within the phenomenal world. 


Religion includes also the following psychological charac- 
teristics: 


4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes 
the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to 
earnestness and heroism. 

5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in 


relation to others, a preponderance of loving affec- 
tions.” *° 


From general definitions we turn to specific qualities which 
James looked for in religion. Among the most important of 
these would seem to be “ richness.” “‘ Although some persons 


14 P. 53 15 Pp. 485-6. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 189 


aim most at intellectual purity and simplification,” he tells 
us in the Varieties, “for others richness is the supreme im- 
aginative requirement.” ** Some minds, as he goes on to say, 
need “something institutional and complex, majestic in the 
hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority de- 
scending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for 
adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort 
from the Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the 
system. One feels then as if in presence of some vast incrusted 
work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the multitudinous 
liturgical appeal; one gets the ‘Nainarstite vibration unin from 
every quarter.” *” 

Much in James points to a sympathy with the general posi- 
tion of Protestantism. His attitude of reliance on individual 
authority, distaste for institutionalism, and belief in the pos- 
sibility of loss which should be eternal is indeed just what 
Professor George Cross of Rochester Theological Seminary 
has called the characteristically Protestant position. But pas- 
sages like the above indicate how strongly he was attracted to 
the liturgical in worship. This attraction was undoubtedly 
closely linked with his aesthetic interest. As is well known, he 
tried his hand at painting when a young man. Henry James 
has given us this picture of his youthful habit. “As I catch 
W. J.’s image, from far back, at its most characteristic, he 
sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially under 
the lamplight of the Fourteenth Street back parlor; and not 
as with a plodding patience which I think would less have af- 
fected me, but easily, freely, and, as who should say, infal- 
libly. . . .” 78 The attempt has frequently been made to relate 
James’s aesthetic to his philosophic insight.” The argument 
seems always to have run along the following lines. James 

Saha 50: 

17 P, 460. 

18 4 Small Boy and Others, p. 207. 

19 E.g. by Flournoy, Chap. 1 of The Philosophy of William James, Love- 
joy, “ William James as Philosopher,” International Journal of Ethics, Jan. 29, 
1911; D. S. Miller, “ Some Aspects of William James’s Philosophy,” Journal of 


Philosophy etc., Nov. 24, 1910; G. Vorbrodt, “ William James’s Philosophie,” 
Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik (Leipzig), 157: 1 


190 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


was a pluralist and individualist, also an artist. His artistic in- 
sight must, then, have displayed itself in his sense for signifi- 
cant detail. As Professor Lovejoy has especially well expressed 
it, ‘‘ James had the artist’s ‘ purity of eye’ applied to human 
nature, he could see distinctions and differences. . . . James’s 
genius lay chiefly in this — that he retained an extraordinary 
immunity to the deadening influences of the intellectual proc- 
ess of classification and generalization. . . . Each separate 
fact was unique.”’ 

The only fault that can be found with this statement is that 
it does not go far enough. James surely did have the artist’s 
sense for significant detail. But the artist notices more than 
details. He sees details in their larger relationships. And James 
had an interest in wholes as well as in parts. Empiricism, as 
he claimed, does begin with the parts, but it leads toward 
wholes, especially radical empiricism with the larger relation- 
ships of which it brings a view. We have already seen James’s 
aesthetic and religious interest in larger entities. We have 
observed that with true artistic insight he envisaged the uni- 
versal in and through the individual, he understood man be- 
cause he knew men, in the individual religious experience he 
found the common essence of religion. And have we not seen 
as well that the Whole made its own appeal to James apart 
from any reference to its details? For him the absolute had 
its own “ majesty ” and “nobility ” and “ formal grandeur,” 
its “sweep and dash ” attracted him. Its deficiency lay in the 
fact that it was only a setting. It furnished but a “pallid out- 
line for the real world’s richness.” 

To return to our quotation about the liturgy — “‘ Compared 
with such a noble complexity,” James goes on to say, “in 
which ascending and descending movements seem in no way 
to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, 
is insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in 
place, how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how 
bare the atmosphere of those isolated religious lives whose 
boast it is that ‘man in the bush with God may meet.’ What 
a pulverization and levelling of what a gloriously piled-up 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 191 


structure.” *° Clearly in this instance James’s ‘“ aesthetic sen- 
timent ” is a sense for details en masse rather than singly. 
In the aesthetic and religious realms as elsewhere pluralism is 
not a plea for disconnectedness, but rather a protest against 
a too rigid and regular conformity. 

This leads to a further observation on James’s interest in 
details and its relation to his religious interest. We have just 
seen that the significance of details, both aesthetically and 
religiously, seems for James to have lain as much in their 
setting, their larger relationships, as in themselves. But James 
had a different kind of interest in particular, individual things. 
A belief to interest him had to give him immediate touch with 
particular phenomena, or perhaps one should say had to give 
him practical contact with tangible objects. Something con- 
crete which he could, so to speak, handle, and deal with ob- 
jectively, and react to with definiteness had to form a part 
of any view or theory which was to hold his attention. In the 
passage quoted above we observed his interest in the richness 
of the Catholic ritual. But he was attracted by its concrete- 
ness as well as its richness. A letter to Thomas Davidson, 
dated March 30, 1884, brings this out in interesting fash- 
ion: «** . I confess the idea of engrafting the bloodless 
pallor ie Boosie Unitarianism on the Roman temperament 
strikes one at first sight as rather queer. Unitarianism seems 
to have a sort of moribund vitality here, because it is a branch 
of Protestantism and the tree keeps the branch sticking out. 
But whether it could be grafted on a catholic trunk seems to 
me problematic. I confess I rather despair of any popular re- 
ligion of a philosophic character; and I sometimes find myself 
wondering whether there can be any popular religion raised 
on the ruins of the old Christianity without the presence of 
that element which in the past has presided over the origin 
of all religions, namely, a belief in new physical facts and pos- 
sibilities. Abstract considerations about the soul and the re- 
ality of a moral order will not do in a year what the glimpse 
into a world of new phenomenal possibilities enveloping those 


20 Varieties, p. 460. 


192 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


of the present life, afforded by an extension of our insight into 
the order of nature, would do in an instant.” ** 

With this interest prominent it is not surprising that the re- 
ligion of the Varieties is primarily the religion that does par- 
ticular things. When it is healthy-minded it achieves salvation 
by relaxation,” using as its methods suggestions,” medita- 
tion,* “recollection.” °° The “sick soul” needs deliverance 
perhaps in the “coarser” revivalistic, orgiastic ways with 
blood and miracles.** The “ divided self” is unified through 
religion either gradually or suddenly.” Conversions may be 
with or without volition ** accompanied by sensory and motor 
automatisms,”® and are interesting both in themselves and 
on account of their fruits for life. “ Saintliness” and 
its values leads to a discussion of various kinds of ex- 
citements,*° subconscious influences,** peace of mind, 
charity, equanimity, purity, asceticism, obedience, democ- 
racy, poverty, etc.” 

From these two specific interests, the aesthetic and the par- 
ticularistic, we turn to a comment on James’s personal religion. 
In the first place, the interest in particular, concrete, and 
tangible things which we have just remarked as character- 
istic of his study of religion was also characteristic of his 
personal belief. Throughout his life his interest consistently 
centered in the things that are accomplished by religion, the 
lives that are touched, the healthiness of mind which is 
brought, the “last things, fruits, consequences, facts ” of re- 
ligion. The following unpublished letter to Mrs. Prince gives 
evidence of this kind of interest. And the date (indicated by 
the postmark on the envelope) shows that James had it long 
before either the Varieties or Pragmatism was written. 


21 Letters, 1: 236-7. at Pease 
22 Pp. 109 fi. 28 P. 206. 
ee OP ert 2 28°'P.7250: 
24 P. rer. . 80 Pp. 262 fff. 
25 7 PSULr6. BieP Asst: 


26 P, 162. ddl OE Wy (08 1 


OF WILLIAM $AMES 193 


CAMBRIDGE, April 30 (1886) 
My dear Kitty, 

Your card and letter about Miss Robbins and her possible 
cook maid have duly arrived, and I will leave Alice whom 
they most concern, to answer them. Altho slow she is sure. 

I mail you, with this, a very beautiful little book which it is 
possible you may know — The Christian’s Secret of a Happy 
Life. It was given to me last winter by the author, Mrs. Pear- 
sall Smith of Philadelphia, a Quakeress, who had a daughter 
in the Annex and a son in College. As you know, I am not a 
child of God after the fashion inculcated in this book, nor has 
the book given me any active impulse to become one. Yet 
strange to say it moves me, and makes me approve of it in 
the highest degree. I think that what I most feel is perhaps 
the firm consistent and unsentimental way in which the prac- 
tical consequences of giving one’s will to God are traced out 
which I like so. One can enjoy so healthy a tracing out of 
consequences even if one will not make the assumption that 
starts the whole. If you are able to read a little in it, I can- 
not but think you will like it. If you don’t, that will interest 
me, possibly even more. Keep it until I ask for it again — 
many months hence. 

Alice has found Kingsley’s Greek Heroes, and sent it to the 
Warners. 

I have been excessively busy. Too many irons! I am now, 
among other things, visiting materializing mediums! A strange 
and in many ways disgusting experience, which I have con- 
scientiously undertaken to sit out. But next year I shall settle 
down to a narrower line of work. We are all well. Isn’t the 
growth of spring delicious? Alice will write to you:soon — but 
asks now for Miss Robbins’s address. Won’t you please send 
it on a post-card? I do hope you are pretty well. 

Ever affectionately, 
W. J. 


Another letter, written apparently a few weeks before this 
one, concludes with these lines: 


194 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


You cannot tell, my dearest Kitty, how the sight of your 
—what shall I say? — soundness, robustness of soul, under 
all you have to bear, refreshes and fortifies me. Your ex- 
ample has been the best religious lesson I have ever had in 
my life— yours and your doctor’s. 

Always yours, 
Won. JAMES 


(‘Your doctor ” refers of course to Dr. William H. Prince.) 


After this evidence of personal interest in the particular 
pragmatic and tangible consequences of religious belief, evi- 
dence which is borne out by our whole discussion of James’s 
individualistic interest, let us take up the “ mystical germ ” 
to which allusion has been made before. Just what did James 
mean by saying that he had a ‘“‘ mystical germ ” ? The largest 
number of recorded references to it occur in letters written 
during the year 1904. Writing to E. D. Starbuck with regard 
to a review of the Varieties by the latter he says: “I have no 
mystical experience of my own, but just enough of the germ 
of mysticism in me to recognize the region from which their 
voice comes when [I heard it.” ** To J. H. Leuba who had re- 
viewed the Varieties he wrote in a similar vein: ‘‘ Your only 
consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic atheis- 
tic naturalism; and, without any mystical germ in us, that, I 
believe, is where we all should unkesitatingly be today.” ** 
His reply in the same year to Professor Pratt’s questionnaire 
carries out this thought. 


Q. Why do you believe in God? Is it from some argument? 
A. Emphatically, no. 


Q. Or because you have experienced his presence? 
A. No, but rather because I need it, so that it “‘ must ” 
be true. 


33 Letters, 2: 210. 
84 Letters, 2: 212. 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 195 


Q. Or from authority, such as that of the Bible or of some 
prophetic person? 

A. Only the whole tradition of religious people, to 

which something in me makes admiring response. 


QO. Or from any other reason? 
A. Only from the social reasons. 


Q. Is God very real to you, as real as an earthly friend? 
A. Dimly (real) not (as an earthly friend). 


Q. Do you feel that you have experienced his presence? 
A. Never. 


Q. If you have had no such experience, do you accept the 
testimony of others who claim to have felt God’s 
presence directly? 


A. Yes! The whole line of testimony on this point is 
so strong that I am unable to pooh-pooh it away! 
No doubt there is a germ in me of something simi- 
lar that makes admiring response.*® 


The “‘ mystical germ ” then seems to have meant an intense 
interest in religious experience and a willingness to regard its 
data as fruitful in the search for truth, but an interest which 
at the same time was vicarious. The nearest to an account of 
a religious mystical experience of his own in all James’s works 
is a beautifully suggestive description of a night in the Adiron- 
dacks spent under the open sky.** But James will not allow 
us to call that or any other of his experiences mystical in a 
religious sense. His own religious life was chiefly quickened, 
if we follow his word, by his imaginative interest in the ex- 
periences of others. This interest seems to have come to the 
fore in James’s mind whenever his attention was focused on 
religion as expressed in the life of some individual or indi- 
viduals. In the unsigned review of Blood’s The Anaesthetic 
Revelation, etc. in the Atlantic Monthly for 1874 we find 


85 Letters, 2: 213-4. 86 Letters, 2: 75 if. 


196 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


his sympathetic interest in Blood’s experience clearly indi- 
cated. And is it not suggestive that the utterances on the sub- 
ject of the “mystical germ ”’ come from the period immedi- 
ately following the publication of the Varieties? It seems 
reasonable to believe that the religious testimony which he 
had read in preparation for his Gifford lectures awoke his own 
mystical germ to activity. As he expressed it in the letter to 
Mrs. Prince, it was the ‘“‘ robustness ” of this kind of faith 
that kindled a sympathetic interest within himself. 

Here do we find, incidentally, a rejoinder to the remark of 
the commentator that ‘‘ the union of religious mysticism with 
biological and psychological empiricism is characteristic of 
James’s work from the beginning.” For James seems to have 
had no mysticism in him except this “ germ” and that devel- 
oped late instead of early. In fact, instead of having to be 
“weaned from his father’s monism ” as this writer goes on to 
say, and influenced away from the ‘“ mystical Swedenborgian 
piety ” which characterized the home in which he grew up, it 
appears to be true that he came to have more rather than less 
sympathy for his father’s views as he grew older. For example, 
he wrote from Berlin in 1867 in a letter to his father, ‘‘I have 
read your article, which I got in Teplitz, several times care- 
fully. I must confess that the darkness which to me has 
always hung over what you have written on these subjects is 
hardly at all cleared up. Every sentence seems written from a 
point of view which I nowhere get within range of, and on the 
other hand ignores all sorts of questions which are visible from 
my present view,” ** and more to the same effect. But twenty- 
four years later, in the letter to his sister from which quo- 
tation has already been made, he wrote: “ Father would find 
in me today a much more receptive listener — all that philos- 
ophy has got to be brought in.” ** And the unpublished letter 
to Mrs. Prince quoted above in the chapter on “ Immortal- 
ity’ told of how in the editing of his father’s Literary Re- 
mains he had seemed to sink into an intimacy with his father 
which he had never before enjoyed. The “ mystical germ ” 


87 Letters, 1: 96. $8 Letters, T2310. 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 197 


appears to have grown greater rather than less as life ad- 
vanced. This conclusion is supported by James’s intention in 
the latter part of his life, reported to the present writer by 
Professor G. H. Palmer, to write a book on Swedenborg. And 
that the interest continued to be vicarious rather than direct 
is also suggested by James’s reputed remark in connection 
with this intended work, that there must be truth in the mat- 
ters which claimed Swedenborg’s attention because so many 
good men had been interested in them. 

Of the early household described by one writer as a place 
of “liberal culture” and “ mystical Swedenborgian piety,” 
Henry James has left us an intimate account in his Notes of 
a Son and Brother. Of his father he writes: ‘“ It was a luxury, 
I today see, to have all the benefit of his intellectual and spir- 
itual, his religious, his philosophic and his social passion, with- 
out ever feeling the pressure of it to our direct irritation or 
discomfort. It would perhaps more truly figure the relation in 
which he left us to these things to have likened our oppor- 
tunities rather to so many scattered glasses of the liquor of 
faith, poured-out cups stood about for our either sipping or 
draining down or leaving alone, in the measure of our thirst, 
our curiosity or our strength of head and heart.” *° “It is not 
too much to say, I think, that our religious education, so far 
as we had any, consisted wholly in that loose yet enlighten- 
ing impression: I say so far as we had any in spite of my very 
definitely holding that it would absolutely not have been pos- 
sible to us, in the measure of our sensibility, to breathe more 
the air of that reference to an order of goodness and power 
greater than any this world by itself can show which we 
understand as the religious spirit. Wondrous to me, as I con- 
sider again, that my father’s possession of this spirit, In a 
degree that made it more deeply one with life than I can con- 
ceive another or a different case of its being, should have been 
unaccompanied with a single one of the outward or formal, 
the theological, devotional, ritual, or even implicitly pietistic 
signs by which we usually know it.” *° 


ar P ey TS 7t 40 Pp. 163-4. 


198 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


Yet although he had none of the pietistic signs, the elder 
James liked to read chapters from the Bible to his family,** 
a custom which William James continued in his own house- 
hold. William James during his professional life was also a 
regular attendant at the college chapel exercises although not 
a communicant of any church. “I am rather hopelessly non- 
evangelical,” he once said. His indifference to church affili- 
ations is not surprising in one whose interests were so catho- 
lic. “I mean by religion for a man anything that for him is 
a live hypothesis,” he wrote.** And again he defined religious 
experience as ‘Any moment of life that brings the reality of 
spiritual things more ‘ home’ to one.” 

As his son, Mr. William James, has pointed out to the pres- 
ent writer, his religious interest after all is to be judged not 
by any outward observance but by the persistent recurrence 
of the religious question in his mind. Indeed James himself 
wrote, ‘‘ Religion is the great interest of my life,” and again 
“the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important func- 
tion.” In commenting on this interest his son has said that 
James’s mind was continually playing with religious prob- 
lems and seeking an answer to religious questions. Religion 
was a topic to which his mind kept returning. Professor 
Palmer has also said that this interest was a culminating one. 
James began his professional life as a physiologist, then turned 
to psychology asking what possible use there could be in 
spending all one’s time over “ bones.” Later he dropped psy- 
chology as decisively as physiology, its interest for him hav- 
ing been superseded by that of philosophy. And the culmina- 
tion of philosophy for him lay, according to his colleague, in 
the philosophy of religion. 

41 P. 166. 42 Letters, 2: 64. 


XI 


JAMES AND THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
OF TODAY 


E HAVE now come to the end of our survey of 

James’s religious thought and it is time to take stock 

of our findings. It has been our purpose to set 
forth James’s religious philosophy in terms of a conflict. James 
was attracted by two different kinds of religious value whose 
claims were at variance with each other. When his powers 
were at their height and the active impulses were dominant, 
he believed that the only religion worth having was that which 
encouraged human achievement. When, on the other hand, he 
felt the need of outward support and assurance, the religion 
which appealed to him was that which brought comfort. We 
have seen in detail that in his writings now one mood and 
now the other gives evidence of being dominant. His final 
decision was in favor of the more aggressive attitude toward 
life, and the pluralistic religion which he thought it implied. 
Yet the kind of religious view described in his last books is 
such as to conserve some of the values of monism. The assur- 
ance of complete final salvation pluralism cannot bring, and 
this lack will always be a point against it and in monism’s 
favor. But the complete certainty of monism is purchased at 
too high a price. Better some risk and some chance of failure 
than an absolute guaranty. And the pluralism of James’s final 
view conserves not only the possibility of real achievement 
but also the peculiarly religious value of intimacy. From the 
God of a pluralistic universe both comfort and “ saving 
experiences ” can flow. 

199 


200 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


As our discussion of the conflict proceeded, several related 
features were noticed. The will to believe, representing the 
active and aggressive interests, was found to mark the inter- 
mediate point between James’s psychological theory of the 
teleological character of human activity and his later prag- 
matic theory of the nature of truth. In discussing the objects 
of the will to believe we found a development in James’s con- 
ception of God which reflected the phases of the conflict, the 
first stage representing the active interest, the second the pas- 
sive, and the final stage a synthesis of the two. In our dis- 
cussion of immortality evidence was adduced which suggested 
a strong personal faith in survival. 

Through it all we have been interested in protesting against 
the notion that James’s religious philosophy is not to be judged 
on the same terms as his metaphysics and epistemology. As 
a way of making this protest the attempt has been made to 
show the incidence of his religious thought upon his secular 
philosophy in varying ways. The very fact that the philosophi- 
cal antithesis which he so often described became, in its reli- 
gious implications, an actual conflict suggested that philo- 
sophical issues took on liveliness and importance for him when 
thought of in terms of religious value. We saw that because 
of its religious appeal James was actually attracted to the 
absolute. But because of its denial of other more important 
religious values he decided against it. The influence of his 
religious views was seen again in the fact that “ The Will to 
Believe,” an essay written in defense of religious faith, showed 
James’s theory of the selective function of consciousness de- 
veloping into a conception of the nature of truth. Then again 
his attitude toward freedom brought out the fact that the 
pivotal problem of his psychology and metaphysics was capa- 
ble only of an ethical solution. And the most stable system 
of ethics was found on James’s own statement to be that built 
on a religious foundation. We noticed in passing that James’s 
pragmatic theory developed along lines which paralleled the 
development of his conception of God. Mysticism was seen to 
make three important connections with James’s thought — 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 201 


offering a solution of the conflict, a relief from phenomenalism, 
and a more authoritative criterion in ethics. Finally we saw 
that James’s personal interest in religion while non-mystical 
was not of a merely academic order but was direct and vital. 
And the whole burden of the testimony pointed to a relation 
between his religion and his philosophy of such a sort as to 
make it impossible to cut one off from the other and to say 
as some have tried to say: ‘“ Here the rational element stops 
and here the vagaries begin.” 

The more one studies James the more he realizes how com- 
pletely as well as how accurately James has interpreted the 
religious aspirations of humankind and how effectively he acts 
as spokesman for them. The yearning after a saving power 
has always been fundamental-in religion. Schleiermacher was 
true to a basic human tradition when he framed his definition. 
Religion has meant a feeling of dependence more than it has 
meant anything else. The history of religion is the account 
of the progressive refinement of that feeling. But it is doubtful 
if it will ever be completely refined away. As James remarked 
in the passage quoted before: ‘“ . . . very little is said of the 
reason why we do pray, which is simply that we cannot help 
praying. It seems probable that in spite of all that ‘ science’ 
may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end 
of time.” 

And when a reaction has taken place against this attitude 
of dependence as savoring of weakness the reaction itself in 
many cases has worked along the lines which James followed 
in his contrasting mood. Men have taken the common human 
virtues — courage, energy, honesty, charity, and claimed that 
they were godlike. Humanity is divine and worthy to be wor- 
shipped, they have said. These higher reaches of the human 
spirit are the surest clues we have to whatever spiritual reality 
there may be. And James’s comment on a view like this seems 
to be simply that it must be pushed one step farther. We do 
not simply find in passive fashion that life is worth living, — 
we must make it worth living by putting ourselves into it. 
We are not merely to accept our constitutional desire that 


202 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


ideals may prevail but we are to transform it into a demand 
that ideals shall prevail. 

Do men grope, then, in their finitude for a Power higher 
than human which shall complete their incompleteness, or do 
they in the flush of strength assert the force of the invincible 
human will, in either case James expresses their mood with 
a sympathy which is both sensitive and revealing. It is this 
intense humanness in his philosophy which has given it such 
an influence over the thought of the common man. To this 
day one can hardly enter into a conversation on religious 
matters with a reflective person without hearing a reference 
to James before the talk has gone far. This is partly because 
James furnished an apologetic which was easily grasped. As 
Professor Pratt has expressed it, many persons eagerly took 
up the cry: “ The sword of the Lord and Pragmatism! ” Or, 
in the words of Royce: “‘ The glad tidings of the subconscious 
began to be preached in many lands.” 

But it is also because James’s philosophy kept such inti- 
mate touch with the problems of conduct and belief with which 
the average man is confronted. The position maintained in 
this study of James has been that it is his reflective thought 
on the problems of man’s duty and destiny — his philosophy 
of religion, that is to say — which is of permanent interest 
rather than his psychology of religion with its hypotheses as 
to how religious experience occurs at all — suggestive as the 
latter are. The hypothesis of the subconscious self as an in- 
termediary between man and the Deity, a sort of “ apex 
mentis,” to use the phrase of mediaeval mysticism, has prob- 
ably today outlived the major portion of its usefulness. We 
now know that intimations diabolical as well as divine come 
over the threshold. It is not merely our religious life that the 
subconscious region influences. 

But this is not to say, as some critics have said, that James 
was mistaken in his emphasis on the role of experience in 
religion. Religion is indissolubly linked to experience. To men- 
tion only comparatively recent religious history, the mediae- 
val mystics regarded experience as authoritative, the Protest- 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 203 


ant reformers stressed its importance, the Pietistic movement 
emphasized it anew, Schleiermacher made it the basis of his 
influential theory of theology, and the Ritschlians among 
others have kept its importance alive to our own day. 

James has been severely criticized on this point however, 
particularly by Professor George A. Coe in his article on 
‘Sources of the Mystical Revelation” * and by Professor 
James H. Leuba in several books and articles, most recently 
in his The Psychology of Religious Mysticism? The argu- 
ment of both critics is that James takes as “‘ pure experience ” 
or a “datum” what is really an interpretation of the experi- 
ence. ‘‘ He has confused pure experience with elaborations of 
it,’ says Professor Leuba. James has, that is, taken as con- 
tact with some objective Presence or some “ higher range of 
consciousness,” an experience of which we can only say that 
the mystic interprets it as such a contact. As Professor Coe 
puts it, in words which have often been quoted, ‘‘ The mystic 
brings his theological beliefs to the mystical experience, he 
does not derive them from it.” 

Of course it is true that the mystic brings his theological 
framework to his experience, though one would hesitate to 
assert dogmatically that the experience itself which the mystic 
fits into his own pre-arranged frame contains nothing new. 
And one may also admit the force of the claim which Pro- 
fessor Leuba urges with especial insistence, that religious, like 
all other experience, must be subjected to painstaking psy- 
chological analysis. Religious men today are willing to put 
their experience on the same level with all other experience 
as far as psychological description is concerned, because reli- 
gion is no longer interested in the miraculous. We do not 
in this age look to religion to fill in the gaps left by science. 
The religious quality of an experience is seen not in its in- 
accessibility to scientific investigation but in its susceptibility 
to a certain kind of interpretation — an interpretation which 
involves relation to ethical values and to cosmic purposes so 
far as these can be discerned. 


1 Hibbert Journal, 6: 359. 2 Pp. 307 ff. 


204 RELIGION IN THE VWPHILOSOPHY, 


If the question be raised as to whether cosmic purposes can 
be discerned at all, the answer would be offered that aside 
from any other method of approach —inference from the 
world of nature or postulation on the basis of the ethical con- 
sciousness — it still would seem that the mystical experience 
may help to reveal the nature of the highest knowable reality. 
The whole question of the objective validity of religious and 
mystical experience is indeed one which is as baffling as it is 
fascinating. But it is decidedly a live issue in the thought 
of our day and in the last five years (¢.e. since 1920) some 
highly illuminating suggestions have been made concerning it. 
Professor Albert C. Knudson, for example, in Chapter III of 
his Present Tendencies in Religious Thought argues that the 
mystical experience does not suffer by being called an inter- 
pretation. All experiences are interpretations and the only im- 
portant question is whether or not the interpretation be correct. 
“The Christian’s conviction of the Divine Presence rests upon 
the quality of his experience and not upon its want of harmony 
with natural law.” * Professor Douglas C. Macintosh through- 
out his Theology as an Empirical Science claims that the 
Object of religious experience is as knowable as the objects of 
sense experience and that religious experience follows regular 
laws. It is predictable, being dependent only on the individ- 
ual’s having the “‘ right religious adjustment.” Professor James 
B. Pratt while unwilling to admit that the object of religious 
experience is verifiable as are the objects of sense experience * 
nevertheless believes that the sense of Presence in religious ex- 
perience is not to be explained by suggestion, and thinks that 
the mystic’s experience may be “ significant of something be- 
yond itself.””° For while the explanation of religious experi- 
ence will have to be made by psychology if at all, Professor 
Pratt would have us remember the limits within which a psy- 
chological explanation operates. Psychology, he thinks, has 
never been able to give a completely satisfactory explanation 


Se DATIR: 

4 “Can Theology Be an Empirical Science?” American Journal of The- 
ology 1920, p. 190. 

5 The Religious Consciousness, p. 453. 


\s 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 205 


even of how persons think and act in ordinary life. And the 
influence of the spiritual world from which, in James’s phrase, 
“saving experiences come” Professor Pratt believes is “ in 
no wise incompatible with any descriptions of human experi- 
ence which psychology has as yet given us or seems likely to 
give.” ° For illustration he uses a parable — already on the 
way to become famous — of blind men trying to account for 
the experiences of seeing men when the latter see the sun. 
The blind men describe in terms of raised eyelids, stimulated 
retinas, etc., the seers claim that they see the sun itself. 
Similarly our account of the mystics’ experiences in terms of 
psychological laws may be true within its own self-imposed 
limits yet inadequate to deal with the actual significance of 
the experience to the mystic himself. 

Professor R. H. Thouless in Chapter XVII of his Intro- 
duction to the Psychology of Religion finds evidence of the 
truth of the religious hypothesis in its capacity to rationalize 
experience, especially the experience of the particular type of 
mystic which his book is largely taken up with describing. That 
is, the power of religion to make ordered and harmonious the 
lives of neurotic patients where the creation of phantasies pal- 
pably failed to do so furnishes, he believes, a strong presump- 
tion as to the objective truth of the religious hypothesis itself. 
In A Philosophical Study of Mysticism Professor C. A. Ben- 
nett claims that the mystical intuition in which “ the solv- 
ing idea ‘dawns on’ one, in which one discovers a clue, in 
which one recovers the forgotten subject of one’s predicates ” 
has a distinct noetic element and makes mysticism “ not the 
enemy but the inevitable ally of philosophy.” * And Professor 
Eugene W. Lyman in an article on “ The Place of Intuition in 
Religious Experience ” * argues that intuition reveals the real- 
ity of the self, relates religious judgments of value to judg- 
ments of existence, and that religious intuitions and religious 
beliefs help to validate each other. In a most discriminating 
article “‘ Is Theism Essential to Religion? ” ° Professor Gerald 


ig Soler Wy fs . 8 The Journal of Religion, March, 1924. 
7 Pp. 101-2. 9 The Journal of Religion, July, 1925. 


206 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


B. Smith maintains that the religion of the future will consist 
of a great mystical experiment rather than the acceptance of a 
theological system. The experience of God, he thinks, will 
take the form of communion with the spiritual quality in the 
cosmos, comradeship with that part of it which is found to 
enrich our life. Finally Professor Rudolf Otto in his strikingly 
suggestive book Das Heilige sets up a claim for the auton- 
omy of the distinctively religious way of knowing. 

Now has not each of these writers taken, and must not 
anyone who attacks the subject follow them in taking as his 
starting point the facts about religious experience which James 
brings out so clearly? In this experience something is done, 
power is felt, the individual after the experience feels himself 
to be different from what he was before. And it comes with a 
sense of significance difficult to define but impossible to ignore. 
And if we reduce the experience to its very lowest terms, sug- 
gesting nothing which is not psychologically describable and 
indulging in no over-belief, is it not still possible to consider 
the type of experience with which we are familiar from the 
mystical literature one which can legitimately be called re- 
vealing of the highest reality? At the very least it is a period 
of meditation upon that which is ultimately and socially de- 
sirable, an experience which brings with it a sense of the 
significance of the desirable ideal and an urge to go out and 
work for it. Furthermore, if there be a spirit or power higher 
than human which desires the ultimate well-being of human- 
ity, why should not the believer come into touch with that 
spirit, by whatever psychological means, more intimately and 
directly at such moments than at other times? And if there 
be no such spirit, is not the religiously inclined individual at 
least putting himself at such moments in line with the most 
godlike thing the universe contains —the moral purposeful- 
ness of mankind? 

In any attempt at evaluating the mystical experience we 
find ourselves back once more in the situation which James 
describes as confronting the “ will to believe.” Shall we take 
these moments of heightened significance at their face value, 


OF WILLIAM ¥AMES 207 


pragmatically justified as they are by their moral effect? We 

do not know, in any provable way, that they are any more 

indicative as to what is true of the universe and its relation 

to us than are any other moments in life. But he who has felt 
A sense sublime 


Of something far more deeply interfused 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 


is loath to give up the idea that new sources of insight have 
been opened up to him. And the will to believe comes to his 
aid at this juncture by giving him the right to interpret such 
experiences as revealing in the highest sense. 

What the religious man wants more than anything else, as 
modern philosophers of religion from Hoffding to W. K. 
Wright have pointed out, is to feel that value and existence in 
some merge, that human efforts have a real outward signifi- 
cance, as James once put it, and that human purposes have 
some kind of ultimate validity. Why may not religious experi- 
ence justifiably bring us the sense that there is such validity? 
The aesthetic moment gives us a vision of harmony. It “ brings 
home ” to us, as we say, the reality of much that we forget in 
the workaday world. Similarly religion at the very least keeps 
before us the moral value which we will to make real. And if 
we can trust our “reasons of the heart’ it brings assurance 
that another power than ours is working for the same end. In 
either case it operates to bring harmony out of chaos, purpose 
out of disorder, durable satisfaction out of despair. 

Whatever attitude we finally assume toward the question of 
religious experience and its authority for us it is well for us 
to remember the insistence of the true mystic and the empha- 
sis which James himself puts on the volitional preparation. 
We must will to have righteousness operative in the world 
before the sense that it is operative will come to us. The ac- 
tive belief and effort is one part of the process, and the sense 
of significance is the counterpart. And our immediate con- 
cern, as James so often urges, is to play the game like men, 
making values valid, insisting that the moral ideals of our 
everyday life shall have eternal significance, demanding rec- 


208 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


ognition from the cosmos for the victories won daily by the 
human spirit, in Donald Hankey’s phrase, betting our lives 
that there is a God. 

So the main currents of the religious thought of our day 
have met in James to emerge in clarified form. Religion by 
its nature will always depend on “ inner experience.”’ Men will 
be religious because “‘ they have to be,” because their experi- 
ence makes them so. And until human nature changes they 
will respond to the challenging summons which pragmatism 
issues to a life of free creative achievement. For James strikes 
as fundamentally human a chord in his eagerness to set men 
tasks that will call forth their highest energies as he does 
when preaching the gospel of comfort. Pragmatism, pluralism, 
and the active aspect of empiricism are worthy vehicles for 
the expression of the conquering human will. 

Pragmatism, as we have seen, is first of all a protest against 
narrowness in thinking. With its theory of truth as condi- 
tioned by particular experienced human values it is a claim 
that philosophy must widen its range to meet as many human 
needs as exist. As such it is a stimulating theory for human 
beings living in a temporal world, in daily contact with evil, 
cherishing hopes, subduing fears, and struggling onward 
toward achievement. In its endeavor to help men live more 
abundantly pragmatism offers a God who is a personal friend 
and ally instead of a formalistic conception. On the dangers 
of abstractionism in religion Professor A. K. Rogers has writ- 
ten: ‘‘ Consistency is a jewel which may be purchased at too 
dear a rate.” And “if it is a question of giving up a good 
share of the content of life in the interests of a formal con- 
sistency, it may be the part of wisdom to take the former. 
Better a fulness of life which outstrips the logical insight than 
an intellectual satisfaction won by reducing life to Procrustean 
limits.” Better especially where religion is concerned, for ‘‘ We 
never should take the trouble to recognize, much less worship 
that which had no possible bearing on the demands of our 
own lives.” *° And Professor Lyman adds: “If we are to gain 


10 The Religious Conception of the World, pp. 73, 81. 


OF WILLIAM ‘AMES 209 


a genuinely spiritual interpretation of the universe we must 
draw upon the entire spiritual experience of man.” ** 

Secondly, pragmatism not only requires that a religious view 
of the world shall show a sensitiveness to the demands of the 
whole being, it also emphasizes the moral element as religiously 
essential. Here as in the former case it attacks absolute ideal- 
ism with especial vigor. The attempt of the latter to find an 
ultimate synthesis in which the distinctive quality of evil is 
transcended is for pragmatism the unpardonable sin. We must 
not eliminate the actively and combatively moral element from 
religion, and we do eliminate it if we refuse to recognize evil’s 
realness. And, further, the claims of morality must be taken 
into account in any determination of truth. The issue between 
theism and materialism, like any ultimate issue, may have 
meaning only as its implications for morality are made ex- 
plicit. Not only religion, but truth itself must take account of 
the claims of the moral consciousness. God cannot be beyond 
good and evil, and truth itself is no more final than the moral 
law. 

Third, allied to pragmatism’s stress on the moral is its stress 
on the need for courage, especially the need for a courageous 
selective faith which will fix its attention on the desirable 
things in life and refuse to let them be overwhelmed by the 
things that are less desirable. Pragmatism raises to the status 
of a philosophy of life the implicit attitude of the man who 
keeps his gaze fixed on the things that are of good report and 
by a sheer act of will refuses to allow them to become ob- 
scured. It looks on the life of the universe itself as an ad- 
venture and on God as risking as much or more than we. 
Rather paradoxically it combines moral seriousness with an 
optimistic faith that life’s fight can be won if we will to win 
it. “Why is not the realist, with all his sad heroism and re- 
signed courage, the noblest and best that man has imagined? ” 
asks Professor E. A. Singer.’ “ Because realism is a philoso- 
phy of little faith! Faith it is that makes worlds, realistic 


11 Theology and Human Problems, chap. 1. 
12 Chapter on “ Pragmatism” in Modern Thinkers and Present Problems. 


210 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


science has only the wit to acknowledge and the strength to 
suffer what faith has wrought. Bold to endure, it is timid to 
change, and a world in the making needs its makers, needs its 
poets and actors more than it needs audience or spectator. At 
the bottom of the realist’s brave heart lurks an abiding fear 
—the fear of making a fool of himself. But a world in the 
making like a battle in the fighting cries out for fools and the 
foolhardy. Faith risks to the point of folly, and because all 
making anew is a colossal risk, let us have colossal faith.” ** 

Along with its courageous faith pragmatism offers, fourth, 
a freshness of outlook which only a dynamic creative view can 
bring. Reality itself awaits the imprint of our will. Novelty 
does enter the world, especially where we will to have it. 
‘‘ All James’s cherished theories,” says Professor D. S. Miller, 
“ ¢ free will,’ ‘ will to believe,’ ‘ pluralism,’ ‘ pragmatism,’ ‘ radi- 
cal empiricism’ meant for him what the Church calls ‘ new- 
ness of life.’ They meant a possible emancipation from what 
he conceived as the cramping clutch of the past — though he 
also emphasized the treasure of the past. They meant the 
possibility of ‘genuine novelty’ in our experience, the blow- 
ing of a fresh wind, the breathing of an indescribably new 
atmosphere.” ** 

With all these qualities which make it well fitted to deal 
with religious problems go some disadvantages, which its crit- 
ics have not been slow to point out. It has been argued, in 
the first place, that pragmatism is contaminated by its affini- 
ties with materialism. It defines truth as that which aids sur- 
vival, and its interests, claim its opponents, actually do not 
extend beyond man’s physical well-being. But this criticism 
can hardly be expected to touch James, for in his advocacy 
of the will to believe he has suggested that we treat not only 
our notions of the physical world, but our moral and spiritual 
aspirations as hypotheses by which future experience can be 
molded. The higher needs of man are factors in the determin- 


18 oP 232) 
14 Art. “Mr. Santayana and William James,” Harvard Graduates Maga- 
zine, March, 1921, p. 363. 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 211 


ing of belief and conduct and are to be regarded as such. 
Truth must take these needs into account as well as those of 
the physical organism. 

If the objection be raised further that even this makes prag- 
matism apply only to the needs of the individual, we would 
point out as before that the social requirements are provided 
for implicitly in James’s individualistic philosophy. In any 
individual scheme of abundant living social values take their 
place as a matter of course. 

If we transfer the discussion to the realm of epistemology, 
the objection may be raised that pragmatism, with its es- 
sentially phenomenalistic view, making truth a matter of par- 
ticular experiences, can have no access to religious truth which 
must by its nature be transcendent. But it seems perfectly 
clear that pragmatism does not affirm that the truth of the 
belief of the religious man has no connection with the reality 
of the object of his belief. A necessary requirement for the 
“working ” which for pragmatism constitutes the truth of a 
religious belief is a transcendent reference, a pointing to a 
transcendent realm on the part of the belief itself. No con- 
sequences will flow from the belief unless the believer him- 
self is convinced of the reality of its object. As Professor G. B. 
Foster once wrote, if one “try to act upon the idea of God, 
no matter how it arose, and at the same time disbelieve in 
his existence; He will find that no action will follow, if 
ontological reference be denied to the idea.”*’ Religious 
pragmatism cannot deny the ontological reference, and in- 
deed it seems to point to the probable validity of such a 
reference. May it not even point with more assurance than 
is possible for other systems of truth when dealing with such 
subjects? “If there is to be any thinking beyond phenomena, 
it must imitate science, it must refer to experience when- 
ever it is able to do so and find truth only through some kind 
of verification of working hypotheses.” ** James has offered 


15 “ Pragmatism and Knowledge,” American Journal of Theology, 11: 591. 
16 PD. C. Macintosh, “ Can Pragmatism Furnish a Basis for Theology?” 
Harvard Theological Review, 3: 125. 


D2 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


an especially clear path to the transcendent realm through the 
perceptual experience of the mystic, as we have seen. 

Finally, if the right of pragmatism to contribute to a phi- 
losophy of religion be opposed on the ground that it has not 
vindicated itself as a theory of truth in general, the comment 
may be offered that while pragmatism has indeed been vari- 
ously interpreted, its distinctive contribution is conserved in 
what Professor Macintosh has called “ essential pragmatism.” 
“The necessary — that is, what man really needs to believe 
in order to live as he ought — is true.” 

It seems very significant, we may remark in concluding 
this discussion of pragmatism, that the two methods of dis- 
covering truth which James suggests are the two which have 
always been recognized by religion — direct acquaintance with 
the object under discussion, or ‘‘ working” interpreted in 
terms of fruits for life. If an idea is valuable, that for prag- 
matism constitutes a presumption as to its truth. If it leads 
to direct acquaintance with its object it is surely true. Reli-. 
gion similarly has judged the genuineness of divine intima- 
tions by their fruits for life and by their relation to a peculiarly 
intimate intuitional experience. The parallel path along which 
pragmatism and religion work is shown in other ways as well. 
Pragmatism makes postulates where direct evidence is lack- 
ing, and religion will always have to depend much on postu- 
lates. Pragmatism is interested in truth’s ability to fill the 
needs of the emotional nature, as contrasted with its ability to 
reproduce copy already existing, — it is interested, that is to 
say, in filling a distinctively religious rather than a distinc- 
tively scientific need. It is not without significance that James 
in his first paper on pragmatism, the address at Berkeley, 
drew his illustrations of the working of the pragmatic method 
almost exclusively from the field of religion. And just as prag- 
matism is especially well fitted to deal with religious prob- 
lems, so religion in its turn would seem to offer material which 
must be taken into account by pragmatism. We may not claim 
that every religious man should be a pragmatist, for many 
men have found that the needs of the religious life as of all 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 213 


life were better served by other philosophies. But it seems 
as though every pragmatist should be a religious believer in 
some significant sense. As Professor Macintosh has expressed 
it: “ Any pragmatic philosophy which is to satisfy the whole 
man at his highest and best, and the race at its highest and 
best, cannot afford to ignore a religion which meets funda- 
mental spiritual need with abiding satisfaction, and which 
necessarily expresses itself in a theology for which it just as 
necessarily claims objective validity.” *” 

Pragmatism thus offers a religion worth having, worth be- 
lieving in and worth fighting for. It may lack the note of 
assurance, but it sounds the note of creative achievement. It 
suggests the idea of a Power which with ourselves makes for 
righteousness. Some of its interpretations of the nature of 
truth may be open to question, but its essential office, that of 
making truth relevant and applicable to human situations, 
finding truth in and through particular human experiences, 
and making it conform to the needs of the whole man, is one 
which is certain to facilitate the religious task of interpreting 
ultimate realities in humanly intelligible terms. | 

Ultimate realities, be it said emphatically, because prag- 
matism brings us to a pluralistic interpretation of reality. For 
what is pluralism but a description of the world as we find it 
when we examine it open-eyed and unafraid? The charge is 
often brought against pragmatism that it is unwilling to look 
objective fact in the face, that it caters in weak-kneed fashion 
to human desire. But what can be more unflinching than the 
way in which a pragmatic pluralistic philosophy faces the fact 
of evil? 

For we do live in a world parts of which are unalterably 
opposed to other parts — how can anyone doubt it? The great 
cosmic unity which the monists envisage as running through 
all things and regulating the conditions of each individual life 
would be indeed a beautiful thing if we could find it in ex- 
perience. But life as one views it sweating in the stoke-hole 
or entangled in the barbed wire of no-man’s land or confined 


17 Op. cit, 


214 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


in the psychopathic ward of the municipal hospital not only 
suggests incompleteness but brings out the wltimate nature 
of its fragmentary quality for many, many individuals. And 
even if we disregard those lives which are prevented from 
becoming complete by outward circumstances, what can one 
say of the lives spent in more favorable surroundings? How 
many of those upon whom opportunity smiles achieve any- 
thing like a unified plan? Life is like a hockey game, one mo- 
nistic philosopher tells his class, with its unified basis implicit 
throughout the game and coming to consciousness at special 
moments. But while the players are few the spectators are 
many, and of most lives it would seem to be more nearly true 
that theirs was the role of experiencing many different situa- 
tions with varying degrees of unity, watching a hockey game 
at one moment and seeking an escape from the cold at the 
next. 

This is not to say that a unified life is undesirable. It is 
merely to assert that in most cases it is unattainable. Unity 
must be fought for, we must will into our lives what unity 
we can. And we are better equipped for the strife if we 
realize at the start that unity is a goal and not a pre-condi- 
tion. Furthermore, whatever unity is gained is susceptible to 
many interpretations. As James wrote to Mrs. Ethel Puffer 
Howes (in an unpublished letter): “There is always more 
than one formula of the unity to be found in the variety of a 
human being.” 

So pluralism gives us a more accurate and helpful account 
than does monism of the conditions with which we are con- 
fronted. In addition it gives us more scope for that essen- 
tially religious quality, the imagination. The “ unclassified re- 
siduum ” of which James talks suggests both undetermined 
possibility in the individual life and ultimate mystery in the 
cosmos. The one, as James has told us, is not only too big to 
be worshipped, it is too small to represent the unlimited. As 
Francis Bacon has said, ‘‘ Nature is too subtle for any argu- 
ment.” A worshipper in that triumph of Byzantine skill, St. 
Sophia at Constantinople, has the feeling of infinity rather 


OF WILLIAM }AMES 216 


than of unity. The Gothic cathedrals of France suggest un- 
limited possibility rather than an unimaginative definiteness. 
It is not difficult to agree with Renouvier that the type of 
mind which produces the conceptions “I am that I am” 
and ‘‘ There is no God but God” is the type which becomes 
most narrowly and arrogantly fanatical. 

Finally, as we have seen in detail, in James’s view plural- 
ism both provides for religious intimacy and suggests the only 
possible scheme wherein the pragmatic life of freedom and 
moral creative activity can be earried on. And is it said that 
in spite of these virtues pluralism never can become a phi- 
losophy of religion on account of its denial of the One whom 
the mystics commonly proclaim as the Object of their vision? 
Let us hear the comment of one of the greatest of our modern 
mystics on this. “It is only partially true,” he says, “to 
assert that the mystic experiences the unity of divinity; his 
experience lies beyond all enumeration. When he speaks of 
unity, he refers to something which has neither unity nor mul- 
tiplicity, and simultaneously possesses both. . . . Such a man 
cannot deny any expression of life.” ** 

And just as we found that pragmatism and religion supple- 
mented each other so here again we find religious experience 
offering data which point toward a pluralistic theory. The 
“saving experiences ” of religion, as James interprets them, 
are a clear case of the coming of genuine novelty. They could 
not have been predicted by rationalism. 

So pluralism brings us to empiricism. And empiricism con- 
tributes to religious philosophy not merely by passively ac- 
cepting these saving experiences but by actively asserting the 
power of faith. With rationalism faith has little in common. 
As Sabatier expresses it, rationalism ‘‘ in giving to religion a 
rational or doctrinal content . . . empties it of its real con- 
tent, of specific religious experience; it kills faith, which no 
longer having an object of its own has no raison d’étre.”’* 
Radical empiricism in its turn finds a place in a philosophy 


18 Count Hermann Keyserling, “The Travel Diary of a Philosopher,” 
Eng. tr. 1: 104. 
19 Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 339. 


216 RELIGION IN THE PHILOSOPHY 


of religion through its requirement that good and evil be clearly 
distinguished, that the relations between the two be external; 
and in the second place by requiring that relations shall be 
empirically known, a requirement which as we have seen is 
fulfilled in religion by the mystic. 

Pragmatism as an attitude, pluralism as a description of 
reality, empiricism as a method. All are open to abuse, em- 
piricism probably more than the others. If it be taken as 
justifying the accepting of all unusual experiences as revela- 
tions of the will of the Deity, the result will of course be 
chaos. And the difficulty of knowing how to distinguish false 
from true revelation is increased since the mere fact of given- 
ness is no necessary sign of objectivity. An ‘‘ uprush from the 
subliminal” brings with it a wholly convincing sense of ex- 
ternality. But if the empirical method is employed in the 
larger sense of making discriminating use of data other than 
those which enter into an exclusively logical process, subject- 
ing them to experiment and verifying them by as many tests 
as possible, it furnishes a legitimate method to use in the 
quest for religious truth. In the field of religion apodictic cer- 
tainty seems to be out of the question. The logical proofs of 
God of one generation have rarely proved acceptable to the 
next. For one thing, the God which they demonstrate is a 
God of the rational consciousness, an “ Inevitable Inference ” 
as James says. For another thing, we feel that the final truth 
about ultimate reality is too great to be demonstrated as com- 
pletely as logic attempts to do it. Empiricism, with its more 
modest method, claiming inductive probability instead of ra- 
tional certainty, seems better qualified than rationalism to 
deal with the Great Unknown. 

And when empiricism is supported by the use of the prag- 
matic test the combination is formidable. As a matter of his- 
tory religion has been taught experimentally. Men have been 
told to taste and see that the Lord is good. The voluntaristic 
element has also been stressed. It is he who has willed to do 
God’s will that has known of the doctrine. And the test of 
moral working has been freely applied. The author of the 


OF WILLIAM FAMES 217 


epistle of St. James wrote that faith without works was dead. 
St. Teresa judged which of her experiences were of God by 
their moral results. Jonathan Edwards applied the same test 
to discover the genuineness of conversions in times of revival. 

So if we grant that religious belief must deal with probabili- 
ties rather than certainties, it would follow that once we are 
armed with the empirical method, the pragmatic test, and the 
will to believe, we are as well equipped to find religious truth 
as it is possible for us to be. James’s statement of the case 
for the will to believe still holds. It is true that life demands 
a decision from us, and that to doubt is to decide in the nega- 
tive. And James’s qualification that the issues must be “ live ” 
removes any possible interpretation of his thought as Jjustify- 
ing belief in “ whatever we like to believe.’ An active life 
attitude must be assumed, and whichever way we decide we 
act on probabilities and make postulates. And, remembering 
that we are still in the realm of probabilities only, is it 
not true that the testimony of religious experience tends to 
verify the postulates made by the will to believe? When a re- 
ligious experience bears moral fruits for life pragmatic em- 
piricism seems justified in claiming that it may be of God. 
What experience can be said to come from God and to be 
a revelation of primal reality if not one that suggests the 
ultimate significance of everyday moral activity? What kind 
of experience can be either more “saving” or ‘ revealing ” 
than that which suggests, as James would put it, that “the 
ideal and the real are dynamically continuous ” ? We all have 
enough of what James called the “ mystical germ” in us to 
feel the glow that comes in moments when life takes on a 
larger significance, to understand what Schleiermacher meant 
by his beautiful phrase ‘“‘ sense and taste for the Infinite,” and 
to respond when the larger relationships of living seem in a 
measure to be revealed, all ineffable though the experience 
must be. 

One thing is certain. Whatever be the verdict of posterity 
as to James’s contribution, whatever criticism be made, as has 
been made already by so many, of his “ over-beliefs,” the re- 


218 RELIGION {N THE PHILOSOPHY 


ligious attitude that he describes is sure to appeal and is already 
appealing to the members of the generation just coming to 
maturity. The empirical element appeals to them because they 
have grown up in an age dominated by scientific activity. 
They have been fed on facts and imbued with the method of 
experiment. And the discoveries made in their own day have 
shown so many things in heaven and earth that were not 
dreamed of in the science or the philosophy of their fathers, 
that the whole trend of their thinking will be tentative rather 
than dogmatic. Secondly, the pluralistic element will appeal 
to them because they have seen the war. And while the war 
furnishes no more coercive argument for the presence of evil 
in the world and its distinctive irreducible qualities than a 
smaller catastrophe or than the facts of everyday life might 
have furnished, still it has impressed its own enormity and 
colossal insanity upon men’s minds and especially upon their 
subconscious minds in a way that will make its influence hard 
to escape. 

Finally, pragmatism will appeal to the coming generation 
because of its creative faith. The present is an age of vision. 
Our horizons have been tremendously enlarged. In all lines 
of research the possibilities disclosed are fairly staggering. 
And with it all the melioristic note is prominent. Never be- 
fore were the problems of ‘“‘ The Moral Philosopher” so com- 
prehensively and so intelligently treated. And James’s believ- 
ing, achieving, creative individual will find a scope for his 
powers and an application for his ideals unparalleled in his- 
tory. The religion of the immediate future will be an imagina- 
tive realism, a Romanticism which has not lost touch with the 
concrete realities of every-day living. And the God James pro- 
claimed whose vision is of the empyrean, but whose energies 
are “so sorely needed in the sweat and dirt of our daily life,” 
will summon the coming generation to belief and to action with 
the message which James loved to repeat: “Son of Man stand 
upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee.” 


INDEX 


Absolute, the, of absolute idealism, 11, 
20, 21 ff, 139 

Absolutism, 45, 47 

Achilles and the tortoise, 34 

Active attitude defines the ultimate 
datum, 181 

Active element in the truth-attaining 
process, 88 ff, 119 

Additive knowledge, 50 

Aesthetic interest of Wm. James, 
189 ff 

Alien lives, their importance, 56 

Alternating moods of James, 6, °7, 
et passim 

Alternation in the mystical experience, 
176, 177 

Ames, E. S., 137 

Anselm, 23, 140 

Anti-intellectualistic 
England, 84 

Aristotle, 140 

Associationism in psychology, 72, 73, 
75, I10 

Attention, 70, 72, 74; as moral activ- 
ity, 75 

Authority, religious need for, 114; of 
mysticism, 170 

Automaton theory, 72 

Auto-soterism, 16 


movement in 


Bacon, Francis, 214 

Baillie, J. B., 21 

Bakewell, C. M., xii 

Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy, 
46 

Balfour, A. J., 85, 86, 141 

Belief, influenced by volition as op- 
posed to reason, 84 

Beliefs, religious, and their formation, 
82 ff; their practical, subjective, and 
creative aspects, go ff 


Benevolence of the universe, 22 

Bennett, C. A., 183, 205 

Bergson, Henri, 33, 115, 180 

Block universe, 33 

Blood, B. P., 44, 177, 196 

Boott, Francis, James’s memorial ad- 
dress on, 157 

Bush, W. T., 143 

Butler, Samuel, 141 


Calkins, Miss Mary W., xi, 23, 46, 47, 
165 

Carlyle, Thomas, 56 

Causality, altar to an unknown god, 
78 

Chance, 76 

Characteristics of the religious life, 188 

Chess-player, illustration of freedom, 
80 

Child, Francis J., 155 

Circumscribed field for operation of 
freedom, 71 ff; will to believe, 92 

Classifiability of experiences, 64 

Coalescence of bits of experience, 53 

Goes GeAy E91) 1203 

College education, its aim, 108 

Common virtues, 106 

Concatenated relationships, 52 

Conflict, the, in James’s mind, r ff, 
113, 166, 176 ff, 186 

Confluent consciousnesses, 26, 48, 
150 ff 

Conjunctive relations, 69 

Connections in pluralism, 48, 50 

Consciousness, does it exist? 63 

Consciousness of responsibility, 76 

Consistency not the only concern for 
religion, 208; in philosophy, 23, 
144 

Constraint in the truth-attaining proc- 
ess, 95 ff 


219 


220 


Contemporary thought influenced by 
James, 190 ff 

Continuity of past and future, 77; of 
human and divine consciousnesses, 
144, 170 

Continuum, experienced, 54 

Conversion, 192 

Cosmic reservoir of memories, 27, 
148 ff 

Courage, pragmatism’s stress on, 101, 
209 

Creative fiat in free will, 74 

Creativity, 3, 7, 66; in belief, 8o ff, 
215 | 

Creation of value by attention, 108 

Crises in life, pragmatism’s message 
for, Io1 

Criticisms of pragmatism, 99 ff 

Cross, George, 189 


Darwin, and individual variation, 70 

Davidson, Thomas, 44, 125, 146, 152, 
191 

Definitions of religion, 130, 185 ff, 198 

Delacroix, 171 

Demand for immortality, 153 ff 

Demands of the moral consciousness 
as important as those of the 
theoretical, 78, 86, 93 

Democracy, 56 

Determinism, 23, 76 ff 

Deterministic tendencies in science, 64 

Dewey, John, 46, 57 

Differences between individuals, sig- 
nificant, 56 

“Dilemma of Determinism, The,” 68, 
76 ff 

Disinterestedness of the truth-attaining 
process, 120 

Divine, definition of, 187 


Edwards, Jonathan, 217 

Effort, in attention and for moral 
activity, 73-75; mecessary for zest 
in life, 109; for the postulation of 
God, 114 

Eliot, Sir Charles, 139 

Ellis, Havelock, 177 


INDEX 


Empiricism and immortality, 164; and 
mysticism, 169; and modern reli- 
gion, 215, viii; and emphasis on 
totalities, 189; in philosophy 215 ff; 
in religion, 10; its standards higher 
than those of absolutism, 98 

Epistemological implications of plu- 
ralism, 63 

Essays in Radical Empiricism, 69, 81 

Ethical need for  postulation of 
righteousness in the cosmos, 86, 93; 
solution for the problem of evil, 
76 

Evil an irreducible quality, 37; prob- 
lem 70f, 1x)" 22,120,130 

Evolution producing a standard for 
beliefs, 88 

Experience and religion, 202, 208 

‘“ Experience of Activity, The,” 69, 143 

Experimentalism in religion, 216 

External relations, 50 


Facts not matters of indifference to 
pragmatism, 96 

Faith, (10,702 1, 102) 0205 

Faith-ladder, 92 

Fechner, Gustave, 27, 34, 67 ff, 215 

Feuerbach, L., 138 

Fichte, S,\G:., 83 

“ Final Impressions of a Psychical Re- 
searcher,” 151 ff 

Fiske, John, 78 

Flournoy, Th., 76, 189 

Forward-looking view of pragmatism, 
98 

Foster, G. B., 105 

Mrazer tiv Ga, (ta 9 

Freedom, 24, 46, 67 ff, 215 

Fullerton, G. S., 78 


God, 122 ff; as absolute, 22; approach- 
ability, 61; author of saving ex- 
periences, 129; authority limited by 
human desires, 112; energies needed 
in world of strife, 218; indicated by 
the moral challenge, 12; intimacy 
needed, 143; justifies the existence of 
insignificant lives, 154; limited, 85, 


INDEX 


138 ff; need of, 14; of battles, 13, 
186; of peace, 186; of the prophets, 
40; releaser of man’s energies, 128; 
stabilizer of moral world, 114, 
122 ff; stages in conception of, 
122 ff; with an environment, 61 

Goethe, 108 

Gravitation, as monistic principle, 45, 
52 

Great Companion, 11 

“Great Men and Their Environ- 
ment,” 56 

Greatest good for greatest number, 
182 


Habit, chapter on, 120 

Hankey, Donald, 208 

Hallucinations, James’s census of, 147 

Hamilton, Sir William, 84 

Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion 
and Ethics, 21, 46 

Healthy-mindedness, 13, 14, 18 

Heart vs. head, 90 

Hebrews’ idea of God, 140 

Hedonism denied, 75 

Hegel, 9, 13, 33 

Hetero-soterism, 16 

Hobhouse, L. T., 141 

Hocking, W. E., 3, 16, 40, 177 

Hodgson, Shadworth, 127 

Hoffding, Harald, 3, 105 

Hopkins, E. W., 140, 187 

Howes, Mrs. Ethel Puffer, xi, 172 ff, 
214 

Howison, G. H., 44, 141, 173 

Hume, David, 140 

Human Immortality, 27, 48, 55, 
144 ff 

Humanism, 16, 37 

Hypotheses, living, forced, momen- 
tous, go 


Ideas, practical nature of, 94 
Ideomotor theory, 74 

“Tdolatry of the Whole,” 21 
Imagination in religion, ix, 215 ff 
Immortality, 27, 145 ff 
Imperfectly unified world, 49 


221 


Inappropriateness for religion of psy- 
chical phenomena, 150 

Inclusiveness of truth, 211; in re- 
ligion, ix, 65 

Incompleteness of knowledge, 49 

Inconsistency, supposed, in James, 
16; in the idea of the absolute, 31 

Individualism, 47, 55, 63, 70, 106, 107; 
in James’s definition of religion, 
186; in mysticism, 180 

Infinity rather than unity, 214 

Intellectualism, 66; contrasted with 
voluntarism, 82; disinterested, 118 

Interests, human, as determining, 72, 
105 

Intimacy in religious belief, 10, 26, 37, 
Oli43 

Intuition, Bergson and James on, 
180; “piercing” as revealing a 
standard, 182 

Irreducible plurality, 64, 213 

“Ts Life Worth Living?” 23, 125, 


143 


gackse Le Poet 
James, Henry, the elder, 2, 155, 156, 
196, 197; the younger, 189, 197 


Kant, Immanuel, 57, 83, 104 
Keyserling, Hermann, 215 
King, Irving, 137 

Kingsley, Charles, 167 
Kierkegaard, 98 

Knox, H. V., 67 

Knudson, A. C., 204 


Lake, Kirsopp, 102 


Laughing-gas intoxication compared 
with mysticism, 178 

Leibnitz, 115 

Letters of William James, The, xii, 6, 
7, 12, 71, 75; 8I, 86, 96, Tog, 116, 
134 ff, 138, 148, 155; 156, 157, 185, 
186, I91, 194-196, 198 

Letters of Wm. James, unpublished, 
x1, xil, 23, 47, 125, 146, 152, 158 ff, 
0723 11; 102 ty214 

Leuba, J.B, 137) £73; %104)) 203 


222 


Liberality of James, 56 ff 

Limited God, 85 ff 

Literary Remains of Henry James, 
The, 5) 63; 1575 158, 196 

Liturgy and its appeal to James, 189 

Locke, John, 83 

Logic of absolutism, 35 

Longfellow’s “ Legend Beautiful,” 177 

Lotze, 43, 51, 81, 90, 154 

Lovejoy, A. O., 34, 57, 189 

Lutoslawski, W. 43 

Lyman, E. W., 205, 209 


Macintosh, D. C., xii, 142, 204, 212, 
213 

Mana, pluralistic, 140 

Mansel, Dean, 84 

Materialism, criticism of pragmatism, 
as, 210 

Mathews, Shailer, 120 3 

McConnell, F. J., 142 

McDougall, W., 115 

McTaggart, J. M. E., 44, 78, 141 

Mechanistic theories, x 

Mediocrity repellent, 153 

Melancholy, religious, 7 

Meliorism, 36, 55, 68, 136, 218; and 
immortality, 164 

Memories and Studies, 48, 56, 107, 
LEG sete i a7 

Mill, J..S.,) 141 

Miller, Di'S.'26,5180,1210 

Monadism, 47 

Monism, 5, 10, 15, 16, 28, 29, 58, 65, 
665/135, / 1413 oly mysticism,: 11972 
and intolerance, 215 

Moral holiday, 29, 36 

Morality points to religion, 12, 115, 
209 

“Moral Philosopher and Moral Life, 
The,” 12; 106 ff, 182 

Moral obligation only where there is 
a claim, 112 

More abundant living the aim for 
each individual, 108 

Morbid view, 5, 7, 17, 18, 129 

Murisier, 171 

Mysteries left by pluralism, 64 


INDEX 


Mystical appeal of the absolute, 28 

“ Mystical germ,” 2, 28, 194 ff 

Mysticism, 28, 38, 166 ff; pluralistic, 
48; theistic, 117, 118 

Myers, F. W. H., 22, 148, 168 


““Newness of life,” 210 

Noetic pluralism, 50 

Noetic quality of the mystical ex- 
perience, 169 

Novelty, 46, 60, 69, 210, 215 


“On a Certain Blindness in Human 
Beings,”’ 106 

“On Some Hegelisms,” 125 

Optimism, religious, 13 

Otto, Rudolf, 206 

Over-beliefs. 136 

Origin not the important question in 
religion, III, 129 


Palmer, G. H., 125, 153, 197, 198 

Panpsychism, 143 

Particular objects of James’s religious 
interest, 192 

“Passional ” decisions, go ff 

Passivity in religious experience, 166 

Pascal, 83, 84 

Pathological attitude in religion, 18 

Paul, 3, 75, 82 

Paulsen, F., 47, 87 

Peace of rationality, ro 

Peircey Cis. tAa reo 

Percepts and concepts, 53, 168, 169 

Pessimism, one horn of the dilemma 
of determinism, 79 

Perry, R. B., xi, 58 

Personal _ religious 
185 ff 

Phenomenalism of pragmatism and 
mysticism’s way of escape, 178 

Philosophy a personal matter, xii 

Philosophy of religion James’s chief 
interest, 198 

Piecemeal supernaturalism, 55, 186 

Piper, Mrs., 148 

Pivotal question of metaphysics, free- 
dom, 67 


belief, James’s, 


INDEX 


Plato, 104, 115, 140 

Pliability of the environment, 110 

Pluralism; :ix,¢5, 12, 15, °25,° 28; \20, 
37, g2ff, 67, 76, 125, 126, 134, 
138, 213 ff; and immortality, 164, 
183 

Pluralistic Universe, A, 20, 24, 26, 30, 
31, 40, 43, 48, 51, 52, 54, 59, 60, 
61, 64, 92, 123, 133, 134, 137, 144, 
167 ff, 180 

Polytheism, 55, 62, 126, 137 

Positivism of pragmatism, 178 

Possibilities, important in truth-mak- 
ing, 95 

Postulates as means to truth, 86 ff, 
178 

Postulation of freedom, God, 
mortality, 166 

Power evident in religious experience, 
129 

Practical character of all human activ- 
ity, 88 

Practical part of the believing process, 
88 ff 

Pragmatism, viii, 5, 19, 59, 63, 69, 
46, (82:41, +90; 943" 116, 208 ff; ‘and 
immortality, 164; contrasted with 
the passive attitude, 167; mysti- 
cism’s escape from limitations of, 
178; influences James’s_ religious 
view, 133; stages in the develop- 
ment of James’s theory of, 128 ff 

Pragmatism, 20, 24, 26, 30, 36, 39, 
40, 42, 43, 51, 57, 63, 68, 69, 96, 
100; °1335 136 

intone ei 34, 155;(179; 104, 202, 
204 

Prayer, 11, 188 

Prince, Mrs. Wm. H., James’s unpub- 
lished letters to, 158 ff, 1092 ff 

Principles of Psychology, The, 11, 51, 
63, 68 ff, 96, 100, 103, I09, II0, 
116, 120, 154, 155, 167, 179 

Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 22, 142 

Problem of evil, ix, 22, 29, 36; of 
knowledge, 8 ff; solved by mysti- 
cism, 180 

Prodigal son in philosophy, 43 


im- 


223 


Protestantism, 119, 189, 190, 202 

Psychical research, 145 ff, 157, 159, 
193 

Psychology of religion, viii 

Pure experience, 46 

Purposiveness of human organism, 70, 
104 ff; points to immortality, 154; 
of universe, 126 


Questionnaire on_ religion, 
answers to, 134 ff, 155, 194 


James’s 


Radhakrishnan, S., 56 

Radical Empiricism, 6, 46, 50, 62, 68, 
216; and mysticism, 169 

Radicalism, James’s defense of, 182 

Rashdall, H., 44, 142 

Rationalism in religion, viii 

Rationality, 10, 60 

Rauschenbusch, W., 107 

Real is the valuable as well as the 
rational, 121, 133 

Realism in religion, viii, 218 

Realism of pragmatism, 95 ff 

“ Reflex Action and Theism,” 
123 if 

Reid, Thos., 84 

Relations, external, 50, 58; given in 
experience, 50 

Relativity of the moral ideal, 112 

Religious values, 17, 26, 29, 38, 40 

Renan, E., 80 

Renouvier, Ch., 2, 9, 45, 81, 83, 84, 
215 

Richness made by James a require- 
ment of religion, 189 

“ Right to believe ” rather than “ will 
to believe,” 92 

Risk in all belief, 91; in a pluralistic 
universe, 164 

Ritschl, A., 90, 105, 202 

Ritual, its appeal to James, 189 

Rogers, A. K., 208 

Romantic movement, 56, 82, 83 

Romanticism in religion, ix, 218 

Rosmini, 127 

Royce, J., 23, 25, 39, 86, 87, 106, 107, 
202 


116, 


224 


Sabatier, A., 215 

Saintliness, 192 

Santayana, G., 42, 59, I19 

“ Saving experiences,” 16, 38, 
133, 137, 144, 205, 215 

Schiller.) Fs(C..S8: 245140, 44,547, 06; 
102 

Schleiermacher, F., 203, 218 

Science and religion, 120, 218 

Security, religious demand for, 8, 13, 
29 

Selectivity of human consciousness, 
51, 69, 72, 95 

“Sentiment of Rationality, The,” 9 
10543235, 150 

Shelley, 151 

*Sick> soul,” 13 ff, 18)°20, :37 

Sidgwick, Mr. and Mrs Henry, 147 

Singer, E. A. Jr., 209 

Smith, G. B., 205 

Smith, Mrs. Pearsall, 193 


130, 


Social institutions of religion, 55, 
186 

“Social Value of the College Bred, 
The,” 107 

Some Problems of Philosophy, 46, 
52, 54, 68 


Sorley, W. D., 105 

Spencer, H., 78, 115 

Spiritual force an element in choice, 
73 

Standards for morality, 112 

Starbuck, E. D., 194 

Stream of consciousness, 34 

Strenuous mood, 12, 60, 114 

** Stretching ” important for man, 109 

Subconscious self, viii, 130, 138, 148, 
168, 202, 216 

Subjective element in belief, 80 ff, x; 
in value, 105 

Subjectivism, one horn of the dilemma 
of determinism, 79 

Success a criterion of truth, 88 ff 

“ Suggestion About Mysticism, 

he OnrO 

Superior individuals the aim of educa- 
tion, 108 

Swedenborgianism, 2, 156, 196, 197 


iA)? 
’ 


INDEX 


Talks to Teachers, etc., 56, 68, 109 

Tangibility a necessary part of religion 
for James, 191 

Teleology, human, 72, 104 ff, 115 ff; 
points to immortality, 154; in the 
universe, 126 

Telepathy, 147 

Leresa, 19349207 

Theism, anything less irrational, 
greater impossible, 118; dualistic, 
36, 61; of unphilosophic mankind, 
126; satisfies practical requirements, 
117 

Theory and _ practise 
divided, 94, 97, 119 

Thomson, J. A., 120 

Thought a function of the brain, 
150 ff 

Thouless, R. H., 205 

Three stages in James’s thought of 
God and of pragmatism, 136 ff 

Threshold of consciousness, 167 

Transcendental unifying agency not 
necessary for knowledge, 31 ff 

Transitive states of consciousness, 63 

Trustworthiness of non-intellectual 
nature, 93 ff 

Truth, a process of verification, 39, 
40; built up by working of ideas, 
94; determined by interests, 96; 
distinct from correctness, 95; must 
be as inclusive as life, 119 

Tsanoff, R. A., 105 


artificially 


Ultimate, the, 30, 98 

Ultimate datum of knowledge, 10, 
180 

Unclassified residuum, 58, 65, 214 

Unification contrasted with unity, 39 

Union of theory and practise, 66 

Uniqueness of each separate fact, 190 

Unitarianism and Roman Catholicism, 
IgI 

Unity not always achievable, 214 

Unity of external and internal worlds, 
65 

Unity of the conscious state and of 
many knowers, 31 ff 


INDEX 


Unpredictability of human _ experi- 
ence, 76 

Utility of the categories, 65; of the 
God idea, 137 


Vaihinger, 138 

Value, of pluralism, 66 ff 

Values, 66, ro4gff; contrasted with 
logic, 82, 85, 88 ff; James’s sense 
for, 118; origin of, 110 

Value-judgments, 105 

Varieties of Religious Experience, The, 
Vill, 6, 12, 13, 24, 36, 40, 55, 57; 
Gi 7at07. 100, 111, 123, 1281, radii: 
COQ 177 ,. ISi, 1S0il, 2101) 1026 
James’s comment on the chapter on 
“ Mysticism,” 173 

Verification more important for em- 
piricism than for absolutism, 98 

Verity of religious experience, 174 

Vicarious interest, James’s, in the ex- 
periences of others, 196 

Vicious intellectualism, 51 

Vision, the, and its claim, 100 

Volition, contrasted with intellection, 


225 


82; its importance in religion, 208; 
in mysticism, 178 
Voluntarism in religion, 216 
Vorbrodt, G., 189 


Wager, as illustration of religious be- 
lief, 83, 84 

War and religion, viii, 218 

Ward, James, 44, 142 

Wells, H. G., 142 

“What Makes a Life Significant,” 106 

Whitman, Walt, 109 

Will, 67 ff, 88 

Will to Believe, and Other Essays, 
The, xiii, 8, 13, 25, 59, 60, 63, 
7Oe SO; Se iy 117.1183) ce waa dee Lode 
166, 181, 200, 206 

Wisdom and virtue, 74 

Woodbridge, F. J. E., 46 

World of independent personalities, 
54, 55 

Worship, 62, 206 

Wright, Chauncey, 2 

Wright, W. K., 76, 105, 207 

Wundt, W. M., 44 


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